Writing a blog is nothing special at all, at least nothing more than joining a free conversation. This can be a little bit confusing if you are used that conversations are somehow controlled or managed by some 'important' institution. No more. The latest foolish idéa about getting the old days back is that bloggers shoudl be kept under som sort of EU control. Lets looka at a few reasons this is going to look very foolish 24 months from now.
First of all, here are som Swedish news on the issue:
Title and Subject
Writing a blog is nothing special at all from a technical point. A blog entry has a title (subject), content (a message) and optionally some comments. Does this sound like e-mail to you? Or a forum post? Or a review at some product homepage? That's because it is extremely similar.
What piece of content on the internet do not have a title/subject and a content/body? And optinal comments?
- An email archive of some email list (stone age technology) will contain title/content pairs and comments on these.
- A forum will contain title/subject pairs and comments on these
- Any blog contains title/content pairs and comments on these.
- Any news item on the net consists mainly of a title/content pair (plus ingress).
In fact, classified ads on the web are title/content pairs with some additional data.
So, who is really blogging? Nobody, everyone, or anyone the 'state' judges to be blogging. If you write news you may blog. If bloggers are anyone publishing anything on the net, free spech is no longer. Excpept if newspaper and journalism is excluded, then anyone paid to write wouldn't be controlled but every one else would be. That would be Soviet style web: anyone commissioned to write offcial true stories are free to express just that.
There are no evil bits
It is often argued the web needs to be controlled because of IP infrigment and moral abuse etc. The thing is, there are no evil bits. Electrons are 100% recycled. Any block of bytes cannot be judged by a computer to be for example citical to free speech and democracy or not. Computer only understands structure. If it has a title and a body it has a title and a body. Blog, email, forum, or ad. If a govverment body with technology can stop speech of any kind, they can stop free speech. It's that simple. You can't eat the cake and have it.
Wether the european union leadership thinks free speech and a voice of the general public is important or not (and how importnat) is in the end not the issue. The issue is that we ourselves have to defend our own free speech. Online and offline. Blog or not.
It could be that the EU politicans under stand control of expression but not the technology behind it. In that case, bloggers are simply the people who say they blog, and then almost all bloggers can call themselvs *Gazlonkers * in the future and the issue will be resolved. No bloggers no controlm yet title/content remains as always.
Scary version? everything on the net will have to be registered with EU. Soviet style free speech.
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