Potato I have

Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, sees its original sense being usurped, and so would like to take the term back.

the unit-measure for blogging
is the blogger

I’ve noticed for a while that Firefox browser share at sites I visit is much higher than the 5-10% we’ve been hearing; this InformationWeek article tries to find numbers for the blogging community, and they are considerably higher — in some cases Firefox is exceeding IE:

At Boing Boing, among the most popular blogs, the most recent statistics for the month of March indicate that 35.9% of visitors are using Firefox, compared with 34.5% using Internet Explorer.
[…]
Kottke.org, another popular blog, reported on Feb. 27 that 41% of visitors sported Mozilla-based browsers (one of which is Firefox), while 31% of visitors arrived with Internet Explorer.

I find the productivity boost, just to pick one thing, so compelling with Firefox that I never understood the 90/10 numbers. Now I’m hoping that blogger browsing is somehow a leading indicator for browsing in general, and that Firefox won’t remain a weak minority for the duration.

Cringely has something to say about blogs. He places it in a long, celebrated history of new media, all sharing a few things in common: it takes about 30 years for new media to find its ultimate value, and during that time, it’s mostly in the hands of amateurs–people who can evolve the idea because they aren’t constrained by the need to make money on it.

Cringely denies his column is a blog, and doesn’t seem to enthusiastic about blogs either:

If I write anything really newsworthy, which I like to think that I do from time to time, the only way Google News will show it is if one of their 4500 REAL news sites mentions me. Otherwise, I don’t exist, or more properly I exist only in a blogosphere that I, in turn, refuse to acknowledge.

I’ve never thought of his column as a blog, but I do keep looking for an RSS feed.

But, he thinks that Joe Reger may be on to something. Reger sees weblogs as having a personal nostalgia-provoking value, supplementing our memories, but maybe more interestingly, he sees the potential for data mining–finding correlations between eating habits and workout performance, for example. I have to admit I was unimpressed with the site aesthetics and the software implementation, and kept thinking this is what happens when you mix Tony Robbins with someone with a modicum of technological awareness. I’m also sceptical about how this much data would be captured and how the analysis models would be developed. I’m disappointed that Cringely didn’t find a more interesting application of blog, though I appreciate that he reminds us how long it takes for new technologies to settle into their final form.