Jim McClellan surveys early attempts to commercialise weblogs in The Guardian. Good article with lots of useful links at the end. This is one of those pieces that produces a kind of buzz of anxiety in anyone with a mind to have a go for themselves – it seems to say “hey, come on guys, the latest revolution’s half over. Get your skates on!”. This is where you have to get a grip and remind yourself that we’re still right at the beginning of whatever the blogosphere is going to become. Like one of those TV programmes about the history of the universe, if the lifecycle of the emerging weblog business is represented as 24 hours, then we probably still haven’t heard the first tick of the big clock. Also worth noting that Jim was also present for the last big arrival – the web itself – a decade ago, at iD Magazine and The Face.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.