Blogs matter because they have a URL. They have a permanent web address. So often on the Internet, or in technology, but particularly on the Internet because of the social effects, a little tiny thing makes a huge difference. So this is a little thing, that weblogs have a permanent web address, because what that does for them is give them permanence, so we can keep going back to them and learn about the person.
The importance of the humble URI has been coming up on and off recently. The quote above is from an after dinner speech Dave Weinberger did at the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference, which I had a listen to on my walk home (the walk home's too short — I had to listen to the end while I was making a cup of tea and some toast). In a discussion on the geo-reasoning mailing list, I commented regarding RDF that,
This could have been avoided if the TimBL and co had adopted a well establish knowledge representation language and "webified" it by using URIs for terms, rather than starting over.
To which Malcolm McClure replied,
I think that hypertext links, etc are very much a secondary issue, …
Aaargh. No! URIs — for all their faults — are very much the primary issue. And then there are all those broken web sites. The UK notional rail enquiries site has much more pressing problems to address (it's just broken) but if it worked at all it would still be a nuisance that you can't bookmark a train. Sure, it'd take some thought to work out how to encode a journey in a URI, but it'd be well worth the effort in the usability increase. How do we get this message over: if it doesn't have a URI, it's not on the web. If it matters, give it a URI.
Update (2005-02-01 (Oh heavens, it's February already!)): Make them nice URIs as well, of course. It's not hard. I found ISAPIrewrite, which has a free limited version, when we were sorting out the School's web site to fix this very problem recently. Apache does full regex-based rewriting out of the box, of course.
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