While the web is a massive world, weblogging is relatively very small. The
"A" List you refer to is primarily made up of innovate, creative people whose
sites have reached and are read by a much larger, more diverse community than
just link-hungry webloggers. There are many people who read kottke,
powazek, etc who barely know what a 'weblog'
is. They visit the site not because of webrings, reciprocal links, or ebrayish,
crudely disguised selfposts on metafilter
People read those sites because they offer them something that they can't find
anywhere else; be it links, commentary, pictures, ideas, design...Sites the
aspire to please other webloggers are trapped in form and convention, with no
room to actually interest people outside the limiting genre.
What weblogging's box inside a box does offer you is the best chance since
maybe 1996 to make a purely personal site that actually gets attention, visitors,
and most importantly an audience. If you make something people are really interested
in, interest in the site will grow quickly. If it's somewhat interesting, it
will grow slowly. If it's not at all interesting since you spend all your time
trying to make it popular, and not that much time trying to make it good, it
will wither and die a lonely death full of desperate entreats to one-named friends
who don't return your email, ignore your instant messages, and don't even notice
that you've linked them again. The underscore to all of this is that one of
the best things about the internet in its purest form (of which weblogging is
a distillation in the murky times of egetrichquick
) is that cream almost always rises to the top...
At the bottom, of course, is the circle of hell reserved for those who spend
their time writing critiques of other people's weblogs, but that's a whole different
post.
posted by s10pen at 1:22 AM on May 2, 2000
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so anyway. orange.
in 1997 or so, a lot of websites were redesigned, and coincidentally, a lot of them were #ff6600 (a few brave upstarts daring to use #ff9900 instead). it caught on in the print world, too: for a while, ads and magazines were orange.
a complementary green enjoyed a brief vogue (christopher.org for instance) but did not establish roots as deep as orange.
it's held pretty steady in spite of the blue-green thing that came in around late '98. and the monochromatic grey thing that was creeping in all along, but probably got its biggest boost from virusone.dk (and then k10k.net).
through it all, orange has hung in there, so now it's "back" without having left. like "women who look like women" "comes back" when some fashion editor notices the obvious. (which is that women have always looked like women.)
i think it's one of those things (orange, i mean) people know about and discuss without its ever actually being documented anywhere.
like nobody wrote an article about the whassup phenomena, as far as i know. it just happened. we can trace the sites that did it first if we have the spare time (i don't), but it was never formally announced. (a friend who spent the weekend in long beach, long island, tells me that kids were shouting "whassup!" from their cars as they drove along the strip friday night. stuff just catches on.)
*NOTE ON "NO A-LIST:" unless you mean kottke and peterme, who seem to have self-consciously blogged first. (then again, macintouch and userland came before those sites; they just didn't call it blogging, as far as i know. and i've read that the first website, tim berners-lee's proof-of-concept, was a daily list of annotated links. though what the hell was he linking to, if his was the first site? i guess this is one of those messy questions, like who were the parents of cain and abel's wives? best not to look too deeply.)
i assume by "A-LIST" you meant "first to market." if you meant "popular," well, that's not necessarily the same thing. A-LIST implies "superior," and that's not always directly correlated to popularity.
posted by Zeldman at 10:08 PM on May 1, 2000