Coming Out Party

"It seems this morning that bloggers have taken over the world. Or at least the 2004 presidential campaign...The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging. Who needs television? Let's just eliminate the middleman."
--Washington Post media maven Howard Kurtz, April 29th, precisely one month ago today.

"We've lived so long under the notion of the Web as a space of connected documents, it seems almost unthinkable that it could be organized any other way. But it could just as easily be assembled around a different axis: not pages but minds. The explosive growth of blogging is creating the opportunity to do just that"
--Steven Johnson

"...it's just as important for sign painters to write well for their industry as it is for professional writers to write well for magazines and newspapers--and just as gratifying...Writing isn't a skill that some people are born with and others aren't, like a gift for art or music. Writing is talking to someone else on paper. If you can think clearly, you can put what you think and what you know into writing."
--William Zinsser, in On Writing Well

And the significance of those observations? You'll just have to be at Flannery's tonight to see, hear and find out. Actually, by the time you've read this (cause it's due to begin in just one hour), you'll either have missed or enjoyed (one would hope) it. Maybe you'll have learned a little about blogging and bloggers (we're just going to have to find a word that falls more gracefully on the ear), certainly you'll have seen and heard from some masters of the trade. But most importantly, perhaps your mind will have opened to some new possibilities--of radical or not so radical new forms of collaboration, conversation and learning--that you scarcely could have imagined before.
Least wise, we hope so...