I wrote up a review for Rebecca Blood’s book on weblogs, The Weblog Handbook. Rebecca linked to my review, but people seemed more interested in my theory that weblogs started with .plan files.
Virulent Memezilla discussed the idea a bit. Graham of VM brings up the good point that signatures also were a form of personal expression that changed regularly. He also linked to a post by Anthony Hicks that discusses the role of .plan files as the precursor to weblogs.
Plep thought it was a good enough insight to rate linkage.
Radio Free Blogistan wasn’t so much interested in .plan files, but seems to have gotten quite enthused about tracking the term ‘navel gazing’ I used in the review.
I was also surprised to see links from two places I had never heard of before, Weblog Bookwatch and All Consuming. Both sites appears to scan weblogs looking for links about specific books. In this case, I think it was the fact that I linked to both Rebecca Blood’s book, The Weblog Handbook and Matt Haughey’s book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, that I popped up on those site.
It’s an interesting concept to have meta-blogs that automatically scan for various bits of data and synthesize an analysis of what people are posting. After many false starts, perhaps the age of intelligent agents is upon us.
2 thoughts on “My theory and linkosity”
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hey, i liked the .plan file aspect too! you did a good job of addressing that. i also agree that .plans and .sigs are kind of similar. singature files always seemed to me like t-shirts or bumperstickers, though.
the .plan might be updated chronologically and get longer as it goes. there generally was no archive though. i remember when i was at netcom occasionally listing my latest projects in my .plan. The Well still has them but no one really uses them much.
Heh, netcom. Back when I first got on the net it was via netcom. There were no instructions from netcom on what to do. “If you don’t know what to do, you don’t belong on the internet” was their attiude at the time.
A buddy told me there were only two commands I needed. Pine for email and rn for reading usenet. Ah, the simple days…