Revisionism

I've always felt that Jason Kottke, one of the more well-known people who have taken up the blogger moniker, kind of tripped into his modest fame. As creator of the old 0sil8 website, he occasionally did interesting work, but ever since he began to accumulate his observations into an online testament to the possibility that anyone can get famous, whatever goodwill he accrued from his design work slowly dissipated in a morass of often lame and ill-informed analysis.

Case in point: his belief that "few would have predicted keeping personal diaries secret as a use of the public internet several years ago." By "few would", I guess he means "he wouldn't"? Earth to Mr. Kottke: people have been keeping personal diaries on the internet, both publicly and privately, since before this supposed blog revolution -- it went hand in hand with writing anything about one's life on the web. Varying levels of privacy has always been a key concern of the web -- there isn't one sole entity called "The Public Internet", but rather different tiers of exposure. Private and focused mailing lists have also been present since the start of this whole thing. I don't write this to be pedantic, but to highlight how every new movement of people seems to have a loud and vocal group that trumpets themselves and their new thing as if it had never been thought of before. It's a rare instance when this is truly the case. Although the web diary movement has been subsumed into the category of blog (often called a "personal blog", now), it's a truism that the use of online sites intended to communicate with a limited audience has been around since day one.

Without doing a hatchet job on one of the web's most visible and simultaneously mediocre voices, I have to say that t's this kind of hand-waving generalization he does that will now pass into fact in many of his readers' minds. People will read his glib remark and a whole page of Internet history will be elided, while those with a modicum of memory and insight watch as he puts his foot in his mouth once again.