Thanks to the fact that Google has allowed RSS feeds (widgets, essentially) to populate their new and updated personalized home, I found my way to the the latest headline article on Wired.com: All Hail the Awesome Internet.
As I was reading through it, I was struck by some of the parallels between the early stages of the internet as a business tool and the current state of blogging. Although it’s hardly fair to say that the invention of blogs is comparable to the invention of the internet, one might correctly say that blogs are currently re-inventing the internet.
In the Wired article, Kevin Kelly warns about the dangers of dismissing a new technology before you understand it. In 1994 and 1995, businesses were avoiding the internet partially out of ignorance and partially out of fear:
It’s not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: “It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals.” Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: “THE INTERNET? BAH!” The article was written by astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing skepticism of virtual communities and online shopping with one word: “baloney.”
This dismissive attitude pervaded a meeting I had with the top leaders of ABC in 1989. I was there to make a presentation to the corner office crowd about this “Internet stuff.” To their credit, they realized something was happening. Still, nothing I could tell them would convince them that the Internet was not marginal, not just typing, and, most emphatically, not just teenage boys. Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP, delivered the ultimate putdown: “The Internet will be the CB radio of the ’90s,” he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC’s argument for ignoring the new medium: “You aren’t going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the Internet.”
The companies that don’t take blogging seriously now, or flat out ignore it (Dell, for example, still hasn’t responded to the Dell Cluewatch) will stand to fall drastically behind as blogging becomes a more prevalent communications medium on the internet. Don’t get left behind!
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