I'm not above jumping on bandwagons, but to be perfectly honest, I've never seen one. The closest may have been a flat-bed truck covered with bunting and carrying some guys with trumpets, trombones, and drums at our high school homecoming game.
My eyes were on the Queen and her Princesses following in a convertible. One of them waved in my general direction.
The current bandwagon is blogs and blogging. Already some say that it's on its way out, to be replaced by something having to do with whatever arises from RSS feed syndication, and that scares the hell out of me. Not because I dislike RSS or want to continue blogging, but because Microsoft has discovered RSS and plans to include it in its next version of Windows (Vista).
Not content with incorporating it, they're already looking for a new name and, if history is any guide, will swallow the protocol, add proprietary features, and make everyone's lives miserable.
One thing about blogs that I find fascinating is blogrolls. I'm not sure if that's an official term or not (or has some restricted usage), but what I mean is the lengthy list of blogs I see on some sites. I've wondered before if the person whose blog I'm reading actually reads all those other blogs or if it's just showing off. It reminds me, in some ways, of those Internet awards I used to see.
The best way to get visitors to your site, I suppose, is to write something and have it show up when someone does a Google search. The best way to get on the top of the list is to have lots of people linking to you.
In that vein I should mention that Donavan and Voyaging have both linked to me lately and have said good things. I enjoy reading their blogs, and Donavan's nearly done with serializing a novel.
Back to those long lists of blogs...
The media are noticing this blogging phenomenon as well. It's one thing to show someone using a monitor on some TV show to show us a blog, but now just about everyone associated with any program has to have one as well. Donald Trump even has a blog, for God's sake.
Pundits everywhere are talking about blogs and how much effect they had on the last election, on news stories, and on public opinion. I wonder how many people rely now on blogs (and The Daily Show) for news instead of established publications.
I wouldn't think it would be a good thing to get your news from blogs, but that would be better than getting it from Fox News, I suppose.
Uncertainty
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RSS is already a many-headed creature. Seems that any blog or content provider needs to have at least four different types of feeds. I was a little frustrated with blogger because its exclusive use of the atom feed. I had to use feedburner to convert the atom feeds into RSS 2.0.
Also, thanks for the plug, Russ. I think as long as the four of us are reading each other's blogs, that that is the important thing. If other people are reading, then I'm happy too. For me it's a bit of a game to see the incoming links as they are collected on technorati then echoed back to my wordpress dashboard. Also, the pinging feature is totally cool. You saw the ping from A Layman Writes to my Daily Catch. I guess that happens when you provide a link to a specific blog post, there is some mechanism for making the reference a comment on the original post leading people to the refering blog.
One thing I keep meaning to play with is the "trackback" feature.
I did it once, on someone else's blog, by mistake, when I meant to leave a comment.
My take on the whole RSS thing is that in much the same way that browsers "replaced" applications, RSS is replacing browsers. Many people have given up browsing now, and just rely on the feeds to see new content on the sites they're interested in.
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