Ok, so here's an update on my reading: I'm half way through the third wave book, and I'm done with the first section of the second wave book. The third wave book is pretty cool, it addresses a little bit of everything, and as my last entry expresses I'm not wild about the "ideal" capitalist inspired globalism. But conflict makes the discourse interesting and it happens. Anyway, as I was reading about the independent media websites, which these folks are pressing as being majorly important to the development of the third wave.
Big Yawn.
Basically they described MetaFilter which is at least in my mind the original collaborative news type site. They're really easy to run through open source software, and there's some sort of filter/longer news related website for everything, and there are a lot of more centralized collaborative type news sites like QueerDay that fit some sort of independent media model. But then maybe that's just me. I'm a friend of Noah Grey, and I've been watching this weblog thing for years, so the proliferation of independent media on the Internet is something I've watched intently.
And while I like idealized anarchistic designed communities that end up working, I think there are ultimately problems with this. First of all, if there are thousands or even hundreds of sites built on a model (mefi, photologs, warblogs, punditblogs, etc.) then they loose their intensity, everyone sprouts the same shit, nothing new gets said, and I think ultimately the only people who read those types of blogs after a while are the other bloggers, under which conditions all you have a is a very disorganized and hard to follow discussion board which would probably be more efficiently accomplished with a single large discussion board. Or better yet, a Usenet group (but that's just cause I'm a traditionalist).
While the situations described in the essay weren't extreme, I've seen extremes (in terms of over proliferation). In terms of photoblogs, in terms of war blogs. I wasn't around like some people I correspond with, to remember when there were only a very few web logs, but I do remember when movements at the forefront of the blogging world, were just a small number of malcontents. So maybe I'm jaded. Ha. Ok, So I'm jaded. At the same time, I have the feeling that if everyone is writing the same things, it gets condensed and retold too much, and the jems are too far and inbetween, unless you're a communications researcher, or interested in this kind of thing (which I'll admit to be from time to time) there's too much to absorb at a raw level and you don't gain anything by reading the super-condensed versions.
That I think is enough for now.