The Power of Blogging

As a kid, I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books. It was always great to see how a seemingly small decision could alter how the story ended. Although the phenomenon was man-made in this case, it was a small leap of imagination to picture abstract theories of chaos that spurred concepts such as The Butterfly Effect.

I bring this up because last week I was musing on the future of political Internet marketing, and somehow I ended up finding a hilarious new video by "Weird Al" Yankovic. Surprisingly enough, even though the subject of my reading was "Kinky" Friedman, a comedian songwriter, the path I took to get to the Weird Al video had nothing to do with the comedian-politician's website.

I can't even remember precisely how I got there; I just know it had something to do with the trackbacks of my primary source material. Although I know I can trace my exact path with my browser's history tool, I prefer to leave that question unanswered. There's something to be said in favor of preserving the mystery of the journey.

It got me thinking, though, about the power of blogs and how much more rich our experience becomes because of trackbacks and cross-linking. Through hyperlinks, we can find and enjoy stories that have little or no relationship to our original topic we started researching.

As this was sort of dynamic findability the founders of the Internet had in mind when they created this tool, it is ironic that these blogging features are increasingly being recognized as falling under the rubric of something we denote as only the second version of the original: Web 2.0. - Cam Beck

Update: Mindblob has a pretty interesting post on this subject. Check it out when you get a chance.