Blog Browsers.
A few people have picked up on this comment from Dave Winer about new Internet client software:
"The next big innovation will be blog-browsers, native apps that browse archives of weblogs outside the limits of Web browsers."
I guess I just don't see how blog-browsers could be "the next big innovation", but perhaps an interesting adjunct utility to Internet power users. I'm all for native apps that scan, index and archive weblogs --- I use one myself (Newzcrawler) --- but I just don't see them as that revolutionary.
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Jeremy Allaire's Radio]
Here's my opinion of all this - which is obviously not Dave's opinion or any sort of clarification by him. From my own POV, micro-content is a key underlying notion that we must all grasp and embrace.
The idea of a blog-browser or new kind of NON HTML based browser has been around for a while and something Dave has talked about and evangelized - for many years. I myself have hated HTML since it's inception.
In fact Dave has requested (on multiple occasions) that MacroMedia create a browser with Flash - so that text could be rendered pretty and anti-aliased (among other reasons.) But needless to say nobody at Macromedia understood what Dave was talking about.
So it seems that we've come full circle and we're back to Dave requesting a new kind of browser. It seems that the time is right. I can remember Dave criticizing Microsoft and Netscape BOTH - chastising them for dropping the ball on innovation and the browser battles in general. "It took away all innovation from the world of browsing" - is what Dave used to say.
So here's Jeremy asking "what's the big deal?" Flash works inside the browser and........(needless to say Jeremy is biased.) he doesn;t see why anybody would want to get away from HTML once and for all. Put that horrible mistake behind us.
I for one have been living for the end of HTML. In the future - much of what page rendering, media caching and smart scalable content will be all about - will be to translate this archaic format (dead before it was born) into some reasonable, visually compelling and media enhanced 'future' format.
Along the way - we can get hypermedia right, and index and attach meta-data to everything (for the semantic web) and about 10 other issues - which I won't get into now.
If we could all just step back and say - "stop using the word browser". If micro-content was pervasive - then LOTS of different kind of readers, browsers, players, jukeboxes, media albums, etc. could ALL read these micro-content 'chunks' (hopefully which ALL will be based upon XML) and everyone can be happy.
:-)
