How do you find on the web what you didn't know you were looking for? For millions of people, the answer is weblogs, a compilation of links to sites that someone finds interesting for one reason or another. Add some, hopefully, insightful commentary, and you have the hottest thing to happen to the web in years.
A weblogger surveys the vast world of the web and carefully arranges what's out there, presenting it in a new form. But what webloggers are doing is nothing new. It's what DJs have been doing on the radio and in dance clubs for years now - picking and selecting the best records from what's out there.
The role that DJs and webloggers play in selecting, arranging and, increasingly, reworking and remixing, has become extremely valuable in a world awash with seemingly infinite numbers of new songs, films and television shows, books and video games. A weblog functions like a filter for the web, a handpicked selection of what's worth checking out. What makes blogs work so well is that it's a person, not a computer, doing the link picking, a person with specific taste that we appreciate.
The best DJs have a specific sensibility, and if it's one that appeals, we'll go see them spin records or listen to their sets on the radio. And just as the avalanche of new music created the circumstances for many DJs to be more popular than the artists whose music they're spinning, the ever-expanding information on the web has made what webloggers do increasingly important. We're already seeing weblogs eclipsing in popularity the sites they link to, like Slashdot and Instapundit becoming many people's go-to source for information about technology and politics. We saw the same phenomenon with the war in Iraq, with warblogs keeping abreast of developments better than any single news site such as CNN.
Weblogging tools such as Blogger and Movable Type now make it possible for just about anyone to remix the web. The DJ/blogger is the perfectly postmodern response to a pop culture where surplus, rather than scarcity, is the rule.
Some are concerned that blogging will make more traditional journalism and writing on the web irrelevant. But a remix doesn't render the original song worthless, and there are plenty of instances where a sample has revived a previously obscure song by bringing it into the public eye. And without original source material to link to, many bloggers would have nothing to blog about.
More and more we'll be turning to weblogs to stay on top of everything. Taste and subjectivity are beginning to matter as much as creative ability. Musicians and songwriters who can craft original tunes have already learned that they have to share the spotlight with the person who is going to play it at the dance club. In the same way, bloggers are emerging as an increasingly indispensable part of the landscape of the web, directing flow, sparking trends and creating order out of the cultural chaos that is the internet.
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