Brad Fitzpatrick

In the past few years blogging has taken the geek world by storm, and lately it's started to pull in the non-geeks as well. The act of maintaining a weblog, or blog, isn't too impressive in itself, but it represents an interesting change in interpersonal communication models. While phone calls, e-mail, and especially instant messages have an intended recipient and carry an assumption that the recipient should reply, blog entries have no explicit recipient and no etiquette regarding whether readers should reply or not. As a result, blog authors are free to write as often as they want, without overwhelming their audience. Also, it's common for blog authors to write more personally than they might if they were addressing a specific recipient because there's no pressure on recipients to reply to what might be a sensitive issue. We're also seeing blogs popping up in polit... (more)