Information Research Weblog

Yesterday's Online supplement in the Guardian newspaper carried an interview with William Gibson, who recently announced that he was giving up his Weblogging activities. I understand his reasons:

...if I'm ever going to write another book, I'm going to have to quit doing my blog as I have a hunch it interferes with the ecology of being a novelist.

In fact, I suspect that the activity conflicts with just about any other kind of writing, and some kind of balance has to be reached unless Weblogging is your only writing!

The same issue also had another item on Weblogs, in which Peter Rojas points to the similarity between "bloggers" and disc jockeys, who select from the pool of music to put together a programme. Similarly, those who maintain Weblogs are continuously monitoring the news in their field of interest and presenting a distilled form in the Weblog:

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.

Various people are now using Weblogs to provide an information flow withing their organization - yet another technology the information professions have to come to grips with - essentially, it is 'selective dissemination of information' all over again, but in a new format and with a technology that is actually appropriate to the function.