The age of populist publishing
: I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen that the tremendous potential of this blogging thing is that it brings the power of publishing — yes, quality publishing — into the hands of the people. More such tools will follow (photo, audio, video, collaboration, marketing tools, search tools… and they’ll all get slicker and easier, note the great new stuff coming from Movable Type). And more power will follow (witness the noise blogging is making in Iran; witness the worldwide spread of it).
Here’s Google CEO Eric Schmidt explaining (at last) the acquisition of Pyra in this context:
I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail.
The next step in general for information is the self-publishing part. If somebody takes the time to write something, having Google understand that is very important to that person. So if you view the world as one person at a time, getting that person, that author to understand that we value, we index, we search, and we care about their information is a very important part of our strategy….
We
