Philip Greenspun and Dave Winer (with DaveNet, even before Scripting News) pioneered the Internet Pundit style of essay writing which has served so well for fifteen years. They started as lone voices in a new medium, but the genre spread like wildfire. It was perfectly prognosticated in the 1990 Christian Slater movie Pump Up The Volume. If you’ve already forgotten it, here’s what happens (not a spoiler): Slater plays a kid with a low-power radio station in his bedroom, broadcasting in the middle of the night to the other isolated, angsty kids in his high school. Interesting drama ensues. 102 minutes later, by the time the credits roll, high school kids everywhere are spouting their opinions on their own pirate radio stations. And that’s exactly what happened with blogging, until we got where we are today, with millions of people expressing themselves and using the exact same narrative techniques and stories and styles that the first bloggers pioneered.
Posted March 15, 2010 at 11:24am
