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July 05, 2004
What's a blog, Mark?
Dad wrote:
> By the way, what's a blog?
An electronic diary. Tim Bray, a sort of internet architect who works at Sun, told us the other day in a presentation that the number of blogs out there has been doubling every 4-6 weeks lately. When I was last out in California, John Fowler, our software CTO, told us Sun hired Tim to investigate blogging and how Sun should get involved. To kick it all off, Sun published a website of employee blogs: "Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything."
What seems to be at the root of that is something called RSS, Really Simple Syndication, a protocol for summarizing articles from diaries, journals, online news, really anything that's regularly published.
Even our ponytailed COO, Jonathan Schwartz, has started a blog.
So we can now smell the tulip (bulb) odor surrounding this phase of the phenomenon. Blogging's bound to go out of fashion soon, kind of like LinkedIn or orkut. Yet, you can imagine that rolling journals like server logs together using RSS or a similar protocol may well have a future.
One advantage blogging has over email is that I can write this up, send you a permalink, and it persists out there on the web as a bit of writing for which you can Google, and to which you can link. Disadvantage, as they say at Slashdot: it goes down on your permanent record.
Posted by Mark at July 5, 2004 07:57 AM