We're slowly starting to grasp what this whole blog thing is all about thanks to the enthusiastic words of proponents of the medium like Wired News' Adam Penenberg. In his "Media Hack" column, Penenberg preaches the blog gospel today with a piece called Like It or Not, Blogs Have Legs. (Wait, they have legs now? They're evolving too fast to control the gene pool!)

Penenberg whips himself into an impressive froth about the medium beloved by 'citizen journalists' and '14 year-old girls' alike, telling us:

[W]e are in the midst of a new kind of internet boom, thanks in large part to this weblog phenomenon. It's not an economic bubble, where scores of startup companies run by fresh-faced 20-somethings are blowing through wads of venture capital in the hopes of becoming the first eBay or Amazon.com in their digital niches. Rather, it's a revolution in the dissemination of intellectual capital.

Some would say I'm overselling this, but then again these are probably the same people who consider bloggers "pajama pundits." Or are the solipsists who once looked upon the internet as a fad...

Testify, brother! We're ready for the revolution! (RIP, K.T)

But, since it's nostalgia day here at Gawker, we thought we'd take a trip down the information super-memory lane at the last exciting revolution that changed the world, however briefly.

Looking back at the very first issue of Wired Magazine from 1993, we encounter another writer—Wired founder and editor Louis Rossetto—who proclaimed in a mission statement headlined Why Wired:

[T]he Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon—while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button. And because the computer "press" is too busy churning out the latest PCINFOCOMPUTINGCORPORATEWORLD iteration of its ad sales formula cum parts catalog to discuss the meaning or context of SOCIAL CHANGES SO PROFOUND their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire. [Utopian capitalization, his]



So, we're excited for these blogs! (For now, at least.) They may not be a SOCIAL CHANGE as PROFOUND as the discovery of fire, but they're definitely the best way to tell the world about your jerkass boss and link to funny Onion stories.

Like It or Not, Blogs Have Legs [Wired News]

Why Wired [Wired 1.1, via Hack Canada]