Monday, April 04, 2011

more about blogging from an enthusiast

As mentioned in _say_everything_ by Scott Rosenberg:

As computer science pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum noticed in 1999, the Internet is like a garbage dump with people crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of something they can use or sell, but mainly it's garbage. But there are gold mines and pearls in there that a person trained to design good questions can find.

Weizenbaum saw the Web as an encounter between individual people and a vast, disorderly junkpile of data. Within a few years many of us arrived at a very different understanding of the Web. Most of the words we encountered online weren't being generated or organized by machine; what we found on the other side of the screen was other people, typing away. The machine was just making it possible for us to connect with them. == sounds like things are improving!

If you are annoyed by low standards (in science-fiction-novels, blogs, YouTube videos, popular music, etc.) then remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap.