posted Sunday, January 19, 2003 at 10:35 am MST

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Responding to Dave Winer's "First Essay of the Year", Jeremy Allaire asked himself, "whether weblogging as we know it will truly become a mainstream form of personal communications and sharing, rather than it's current perceived niche as form of personal or independent Internet journalism." His musings raise two major characteristics of blogs:

"They make publishing to the web really simple --- they are very simple, consumer-level content management systems. No HTML, no scripting, no knowledge of web servers, page layout, etc."

"They fulfill the promise of the semantic web (partially) by ensuring that your content is well structured (it's all XML!), and shareable (through RSS) in a standard way, and even well-described so their content can be harvested (RSS 2.0 in action will take is there)"

Interesting that the first paragraph thetwowayweb.com's homepage quotes Tim Berners-Lee, who said in December 1997: "The intuitive editing interfaces which make authoring a natural part of daily life are still maturing." I'm pretty happy with BlogBuddy, but the frankly the actuality is just as the site's title puts it: "We're working on it!"

Davenet: The Two Way Web is a good backgrounder on this.

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