It's a good time, in other words, to step back and take a look at the ways the Internet is changing some basic patterns of social behavior. Which brings me to the strange world of blogs. And the little app is catching on fast. Having spent a couple of days reading blogs, I can report that the vast majority are puerile in the extreme - the random droolings of adolescent minds. Blogs typically are filled with links to other blogs, and in browsing through them you soon realize that they form the communications infrastructure for tightly knit, often extraordinarily intimate Web communities.
People share their lives through their blogs.
The rapid spread of Blogger underscores two crucial facts about the Internet, both with important business ramifications. That was true of Napster, and it's true of Blogger. And the most revolutionary applications tend to emerge not from commercial organizations but from passionate amateurs - from people more interested in doing something cool than in making money. Although the creators of Napster and Blogger are trying desperately to retrofit business models to their inventions, the real impact of the technologies has been to enable people to do things for free that they used to have to pay to do. Second, the Internet remains primarily a platform for communication, not commerce.