Hosted Weblogs
Earlier this week, Nifty launched CoCoLog and back in early November NTT rolled out DoBlog. Both of them are “hosted weblogging services”: they don’t require users to install software (such as Movable Type, Nucleus, Drupal, Wordpress, b2 or any of the others). Instead, CoCoLog and DoBlog offer packages that allow users to sign up and get going immediately, without needing to bother with any technicalities.
As far as I’m aware, these two are Japan’s first-ever hosted weblogging services — or at least the first commercial ventures into the field; the short-lived Japan Bloggers Association looked like one of those many online undertakings that foundered on their lack of a business plan. Will these two services popularise the weblog format in Japan?
In the West, the introduction of hosted weblogging services (Pitas in July 1999 and, in particular, Blogger in the following month) did have a big impact on weblogging. Above all, they popularised the practice, but they also changed it. In her very informative essay Weblogs: A History and Perspective, Rebecca Blood describes this change as a shift from “link-driven” weblogs that “filtered” the Web to more personal, diaristic forms. She deplores this shift — I’m not sure if I agree: the newer, more personal type of weblogs never superseded the old “link-driven” type, they just added a more personal element . So, if anything, hosted services made weblogs a richer and more diverse phenomenon.
If the new hosted weblogging services in Japan will manage to to bring about more diversity, and if they create an environment in which a larger group of people will find a voice with which to express their personal perspectives on things — why, then more power to them!
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