phil wilson :: a geek commodity

3:25 PM

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Sunday, July 13, 2003

Can weblogs change polictics?

Only as much as Ben Elton’s relentlessly scathing commentaries are widely regarded to have brought about the ultimate downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

I tend to disagree with a lot of what Don Park says, but the other day he wrote that Blogs will fade away within two years, and to me, this seems perfectly obvious. Blogs are just websites; before “blogging” took off as an entity in its own right, with a thousand different applications specifically tailored to writing them, people were still updating their websites with personal thoughts on a daily basis. The weblogging tools just make that easier. Hell, some of them have even actually managed to lower the barrier to entry by abstracting away the need to go anywhere near HTML. But lets not get carried away with the difference between weblogs and websites, weblogs are just free and simple CMS systems for the masses.