The Mass Amateurisation

(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything...
Plasticbag.org is a blog by Tom Coates who works in the field of social software and personal publishing on the web.
His own introuction on PlasticBagorg...

Tom Coates is a web producer specialising in print-to-web transitions, social software and personal publishing on the web. He has worked with a number of prominent companies in the UK including Time Out, and developed innovative message-boards for the BBC and EMAP. He recently launched "Conversations" - a new form of geocoded message-board for the UK-based local information publisher UpMyStreet, where he works as Creative Producer. He maintains a popular weblog at plasticbag.org and experiments with online community design and new moderation techniques at barbelith.com/underground.

Tom writes ....
But maybe we did... There's not a lot of difference between weblogs and homepages in some respects. Both are spaces to put written content online, for one. But the fact that homepages had no sense of standard structure, required manual updating, were unbound from time and were resolutely non-discursive meant that they were static, lumpen. At their best they became monolithic tomes - bunkers for content, guides updated haphazardly that infinitesimally accrete "content". In terms of the distribution of the word, the homepage was like a "Time Out Guide to {your name here}". The simple addition of structure and mechanisms for ease of publishing have made the comparable form of expression on weblogs so fluid and quick that it borders on speech. In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us - through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear.

And this is the big leap forward - this is where the value of weblogs lies in the newly amateurised world. This flexibility of publishing creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the 'homepage (as a place)' has become the 'weblog (as a person)' that can articulate a voice. And when there are a multiplicity of voices in space, then the possibility arises of conversations. And where there is conversation there is the sharing of information. And conversation about what? Well everything from music and movies and animation and medical information. Weblogs are becoming the bridge between the individual and the community in cyberspace - a place where one can self-publicise and self-describe but also learn, debate and engage in community. In other words, weblogs are not only a representative sample of mass amateurisation, they're becoming enmeshed in the very structures of information-retrival, community interaction and media distibution themselves. Weblogs are now facilitators of mass amateurisation. They're almost becoming one of its architectures...
[ Through : Emergic.org]