In his excellent book ‘My Trade’, Andrew Marr – a high-profile BBC political correspondent – describes what ‘newspapers’ in the 17th century London were like. In addition to an abundance of grimy stories, they also had blotches of pure white space surrounded by content.
As it took days for any London news to trickle into shires - mostly by coach, or on foot – these white spaces were used by original readers to hand-write their comments on the news stories on the page, or to write their own, personal news (“Uncle Vernon is feeling a little down under the weather recently”). Then they would send the newspapers to their relatives in the province.
In my book, that’s blogging. Yes: clunkier, slower and more primitive than as we know it today, but the principle is exactly the same.
Which leads me to my point: all of the big dot com success stories so far were based on a simple formula: find a basic human need – something that has already existed in the ‘offline’ world, but left many things wanting - and facilitate it through technology. Google is the 21st century version of the Library of Alexandria, Ebay did the same for the ‘souk’, MySpace provided an ultimate platform for self-expression and Second Life is the turbo version of any escapist paradigm that existed so far.
Old principles, new executions. I bet the new big thing in digital space is going to be based on exactly that again.
