“Blogging isn’t the revolution. The revolution is conversation.”

(Or something like that.)

Amen to that.

Absent conference calls, a cell phone lets you talk 1:1 with somebody else. Nothing’s recorded or discoverable without a lot of effort. I can’t call his cell phone back and tell him that releasing OpenSolaris under the GPL3 is a good/bad idea. Phone calls are private communications between 2 parties.

Email might get archived. But then again, it might just sit in 1 person’s inbox. And unless it’s email to a list, the medium doesn’t foster responses from the public. Most corporate emails tend to be private communications between a limited number of parties.

TV interviews might have a transcript or something that’s discoverable, but that’s not likely. More likely, you’d see a news recap of the conference somewhere. If you’re lucky, somebody posted the interview to YouTube. But I can’t post a follow-up to his TV interview that Jon’s likely to see. TV interviews are 1:many broadcast.

Then there’s blogs. They tend to be public. Discoverable (via Google or whatnot). They can be responded to via comments or trackbacks.

Sure, it’s still just “communicating”. But it’s communicating in a way that fosters discussion. It ain’t broadcast, and it ain’t private. And that’s worth distinguishing from those old-school communications mediums.

Fifteen years from now all terminology around blogging (if any is left) will feel a completely natural part of the language, and the pattern it will settle into will depend not one single bit on what language busybodies are arguing about it today. In general, people seem to worry too much about the superficialities of language. It will sort itself out, without anybody’s “help”. It always has.