This podcast of a presentation by Paul Graham showed up in my iTunes del.icio.us feed subscription (iTunes podcast feature + del.icio.us feeds= Very cool stuff) and I curiously clicked Play to listen to it, only to continue listening to the whole darn thing, all 32 minutes 45 seconds of it.
Paul Graham is a popular author (Hackers and Painters) and Lisp programmer, and in this OSCON 2005 presentation, he discusses what business can learn from open source. He uses blogging as an analogy for open source, and explains why "amateurs" very often do a much better job than "professionals".
Go to the ITConversations page to listen to the MP3 audio of his speech.
You can also read an essay he wrote based on this talk.
Yeah, I know he made the speech in August 2005 and I am a little late getting this, but hey, time-shifting is like that.
Excerpt:
On the Web, the barrier for publishing your ideas is even lower. You don't have to buy a drink, and they even let kids in. Millions of people are publishing online, and the average level of what they're writing, as you might expect, is not very good. This has led some in the media to conclude that blogs don't present much of a threat — that blogs are just a fad.
Actually, the fad is the word "blog," at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by "blogger" is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That's going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication. So I'd like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about "writer?"
