James D. Miller writes about weblogs and their future. In many ways he talks in the same way about weblogging and indepentent writers as other have before him about free and/or open source software, claming there is no economics in weblogs. I tend to disagree, still beliving in the economics of attention, best described by Michael H. Goldhaber in Attention Shoppers! in Wired’s decemeber issue 1997.
James also makes the mistake of arguing that multimedia will be the killer of weblogs, since the flashier video/sound sites will take the attention away from the regular weblogs. I think he is wrong on two fronts:
1. Text is still a killer medium, and will be for a very long time to come.
2. Bandwidth is a commodity which will only become more available in time. Hosting multimedia sites are becoming easier and easier by the day, not to mention cheaper. The launch of Sorenson’s Vcast network for instance, has made hosting streaming video sites a commodity most websites can afford. And its only the beginning.