As a publishing medium, weblogs are ultimately democratic, often as timely as traditional news sources, and have a potential distribution much greater than print media. One problem with these personal information sources is the inability to find an audience. Blogdex is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses.

Here's Wired on Blogdex. It's becoming more clear to me now. The question, as always, is who decides what weblogs go into the pool of weblogs from which the stats are being drawn? It would be cool if this was a service, and you were given a list of weblogs from which you choose all the ones you want to follow, and it makes the top story list from links from just those weblogs.

But I know that's not what they are after. They want something that can seem definitive of the whole culture so that this aggregate view of all the diverse personal publishing can stand up to the big media outlets (i.e., one weblog is less important than the NY Times, but all weblogs together might be as important (or more.))

I like to say I don't care about that, but of course I'll probably look at the list all the time.
- jim 7-30-2001 3:57 pm