ZedneWeb
It’s kind of a thing

July 15, 2000

Hey, gang! Did you miss me? (I'm not really sure what answer I'd prefer. While it would be great to learn that people enjoy my site enough to miss it during my absences, I'd hate to think I'm annoying people.)

Anyway, I read an article on A List Apart which takes the view that, instead of filtering out the web's bright spots, weblogs are mostly contributing to the clutter. Easy-to-use tools like Blogger and Manilla make it trivial to set up a frequently-updated site, but the problem is that most people don't have much to say. I'll take his word for that, as I've developed a sort of stomping grounds on the web and rarely venture outside it except for interesting stuff. (And I'm well aware that my definition of "interesting" is not widely shared, which is why you don't see those things here.) While many of the logs I've read have been interesting (and will find their way onto my links page eventually), the ones I skim and forget tend to be trivial in subject.

Perhaps the hassle of getting updates onto Eyrie is a blessing in disguise, encouraging me to restrict myself to the good stuff. Or maybe it just ensures that my inane observations are widely spaced in time.

Also at ALA this week, a look at the appeal of the web as a medium, and why the old-timers get annoyed by the dot-com crowd who flock here in search of fast money--the quest for "eyeballs" and the endless lame attempts at corporate-approved wit. The "false prophets", as the author puts it, "intruding and crowing that the Web is theirs". But I don't want to make it sound like some anti-dot-com screed, because it isn't. It asks, Why do people read the web? Why do people spend money to write for the web? Why do people like me spend their time to put together elaborate sites that perhaps no one will ever read? (See how I brought it back to me? Helps raise ZedneWeb's profile, at least among the people who already read it.)