Physics of the Hybrid Laser

Ten years on from the earliest homepages, and we now find ourselves with weblogs. There are now hundreds of thousands of active weblogs in the world - quite possibly more than a million - almost all of them powered by simple content management systems with names like LiveJournal, Blogger, Movable Type, Bloxsom... There are webloggers in pretty much every country of the world. There are celebrity webloggers, expert webloggers, political dissident webloggers, prison webloggers... Weblogs are becoming "Enterprise Solutions", they're creating empires of "Nano-publishing". Across the world, faster and more randomly than anyone has yet been able to track and collate, webloggers are linking, posting, trackbacking, commenting, aggregating and moblogging their way through the first days of the 21st Century. The world now finally seems to be changing, and weblogging is part of that process...

This is an exciting time to be engaged with this explosive community of people - and there are many intriguing debates about the nature, function and value of weblogging starting to emerge. Some are debating about whether weblog culture resembles hyperactive academic citation networks - does the "best" stuff rise to the surface? Others are asking questions about the politics of weblogs - if it's a democratic medium, they ask, why are there so many inequalities in traffic and linkage? Others are talking about a 'world-wide free-market in ideas' - with all the benefits and horrors that suggests. Still others wonder whether we're all about to sell out. A few say we already have...

These debates are heady and passionate and focused with laser-like intensity - and often they are valuable debates to be having. But their focus comes with a cost - we're losing a sense of context - why should we care about weblogs at all? What makes them different from the dying form of the homepage? How do they fit into the wider context of emerging cultural and technological trends? These are important questions because they situate weblogging within a larger shift in the way we relate to the world around us. And in the process, they gesture at our future. Where do we go from here? Through the rest of this article, then, I'm going to try and explain how weblogging fits into the wider world with an eye to showing how weblogs may form a ragged centre for our small-scale personal creative endeavours. And - as a sideline - maybe I'll be able to explain the relationship between weblogs and homepages...

2// Technically, weblogs are trivial - a reasonable programmer can assemble their own weblog content management system in a couple of hours. It's nothing but a form on a webpage glued to a database with some templating tweaks. Wherever the animating magic might lie, it's not there. Instead we have to look towards what weblogs and weblogging software accomplishes. Clay Shirky phrased it one way when he wrote an article called Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing. In his piece, he described the way in which weblogging simplifies the concept of "Publishing" to the point that not only is it now so simple that anyone can do it, it's also so simple that there's no way of making money out of it. Publishing has come to the masses... This idea - of a form of publishing that's almost completely lacking in barriers and cost - is fundamental to an understanding of weblogging.

Another popular approach to understanding what weblogs 'do' is to compare the process of blogging to the mainstream print media. Under this interpretation, weblogs constitute not just a mass amateurisation of publishing, but a more rarefied

amateurisation of journalism itself. This approach highlights the possibilities of the form - that the combination of timeliness and super-lightweight content management means that the ability to comment and report on the world around us is suddenly within reach of everyone. The journalism argument is perhaps less convincing than the one concerned with simple publishing.

But what both of these attempts to understand weblogging have in common is this sense of amateurisation. They both argue that weblogging software constitutes a radical simplification of previously complex tools. Updating a website on a daily basis is no longer an activity that only a trained professional (or a passionate hobbyist) can accomplish. It's now open to pretty much everyone, cost-free and practically effortlessly...

But it's not just publishing or journalism that are going through a process of mass amateurisation at the moment. In fact over the last fifteen years or so pretty much all media creation has started to be deprofessionalised. We only have to look around us to see that this is the case - as individually created media content that originated on the internet has started to infect mass media. Hard-rocking poorly-animated kittens that once roamed e-mail newsletters (http://www.b3ta.com) are now showing up in adverts and credit-sequences, pop-songs written on home computers are reaching the top of the charts, weblog commentators in Iraq are getting columns in the national and international newspapers, music is being hybridised and spliced in the home for competitions on national radio stations. The whole of the mainstream media has started to look towards an undercurrent of individual amateur creation because of the creativity that's bubbling up from this previously unknown swathe of humanity. Mass-amateurisation is EVERYWHERE.

3// So what is generating this explosion in unprofessional production? Fundamentally it's because the gap between what can be accomplished at home and what can be accomplished in a work environment has narrowed dramatically over the last ten to fifteen years.

The first shift towards the mass amateurisation of everything arrived with a rise in the power of computers and a drop in the price of sophisticated software. Desktop publishing was the first professional tool to meet the mainstream - but it was never going to have a massive effect because the price of producing and distributing a magazine were always going to remain relatively high. You still need paper. You still need someone to drive your creation to all the news retailers. But while desktop publishing was never going to create a massive network of underground magazine publishers, its bastardisations in products like Microsoft Publisher and Word did set a trend that has been ongoing ever since - a trend towards giving amateurs tools at inexpensive prices that have all the power that professionals have become used to.

Today we have applications that are supplied free with our computers that allow us to assemble video footage into forms that can be burnt onto