Kelly

Earlier I rambled briefly about Brand and Kelly.

Today in my Wired feed, came a brief Q&A with Kevin Kelly, discussing his Cool Tools weblog. I'm a frequent hitter of that, though not an email subscriber.

In the interview, Kelly touches on the web and it's replacement of tools like Whole Earth Review. It's a valid point, but I think it needn't diminish the importance of CoEvolution Quarterly, WER, Signal, and the other experiments that have grown out of that time. While the products have, in some ways, moved beyond their origins, the deep influence, and likely deeper underpinnings, of those origins shouldn't be diminished. Cool Tools works in part because of the steady hand of the moderator/editor, much as the original FactSheet Five (the zine world analogue) worked because of the steady hand of Mike Gunderloy.

In my opinion really good weblogs get that self-effacing control, bad ones don't, even if that editor is the calm internal voice of the author to himself. ePinions, in part, failed because that control didn't stick in their community-moderation algorithm. And because, much as the WER folks found as time moved on, the monetization is hard.

Anyway, a recommended read for a Monday.

As an aside, for a research project, I've begun gathering old copies of WER and CoEvQ. I'm impressed by some of the prices they go for as collectors items - the issues with Crumb art seem to have some dealers in a lather of sticker-inflation at abebooks. It makes the process for me a bit slower, unless I can come upon a decent collection reasonably priced. But until then, all hail ebay!

Posted by esinclai at December 01, 2003 07:01 AM |