Are blogs “the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation"?

It should come as no surprise that I am very interested in how web logging and the web in general will shape the future. Yesterday's post at Will Femia's Weblog at MSNBC was about weblogs as potentially being the CB Radio of the late 90's and today. While I had heard this analogy before - it was always in conjunction with an explicit negative connotation. Femia brings up the point that many CB Radio enthusiasts adhere to the belief that it was their beloved technology that served as a jumping off point for bigger and better technological breakthroughs. That got me to thinking again about what weblogs will lead to.

I hope to post about some of the great things (and not so great things that weblogs can lead to in the coming days. And while I have a much less cynical view of the present web than this guy, I think we both could agree that there is much room for improvement and a bright future ahead for weblogs and the web in general if we collectively address some of the mediums main shortcomings.

While the author of the above site may feel he "can walk into any public library, no matter how tiny and underfunded, and find facts, stories, amazing information I would never touch in a month of webcrawling" or "go into a bar and hear stories Usenet hasn't come close to in its 22 years of waffle" I would claim the reverse is true as well. The wealth of information available on the web is truly astounding. I think the author hits on the main strength of the web by trying to label it is as self-perpetuating, machine churning our lies and misinformation. The web and all of its content is valuable because it is not simply an encyclopedia of knowledge, reporting facts as truth. Truth, it has been argues is only relevant when perspective is taken into account anyways - and what the web definitely is - is millions of perspectives on our world.

This point leads nicely into something Anil posted on July 2nd about the atomic nature of individual entries of a weblog. Essentially a weblog, if broken down to its most basic elements, the post or single entry or idea would be the base component. Essentially then the web is simply made up of numerous ideas held together (in some cases loosely) in weblogs or groups of weblogs.