Traditional broadcast media is about one transmitting to many. Personal conversations are one on one or one to a few. There is a common theme to both: people want to communicate. People will use any means available to communicate. Different media portray different facets. Words on paper remain on paper. When you are done reading the magazine, you can throw it away or re-read it. Telephone conversations are ephemeral. If you weren’t paying attention, the words are gone, lost to the ether. There’s no retrieval.

Blogging on the Web is different in its own way. Words are permanent and accessible to the public, but private in that no one can see them unless they know where to look. There are billions of pages out there and yours can easily be lost in the noise. And yet, if your words are worth sharing, someone will tell another who will tell yet another. Your infrastructure hasn’t changed. It’s still a web page. It takes as much effort to publish for a thousand as for three.

What does have to change is the way you write. Words for large audiences can’t carry an intimacy for three. They are still your words, your feelings, your opinions, but your words must change if they are to carry meaning to people with lives disconnected from yours. This isn’t to say the change is inevitable. It is words that build audiences more than audiences dictating words. Some understand and embrace it, but the majority are happy writing only for their friends. The occasional wanderer stumbles on such a private conversation and is horrified that people are writing what they ate for breakfast. Wasting public resources! Violating the sanctity of a publishing medium! The blogger, surely, must be far too self-important to think anyone cares what she consumed each day. What the wanderer doesn’t realise is that he has stepped into a private conversation that is public owing solely to the nature of the medium.

As blogging goes mainstream, that mindset will inevitably change. What is more interesting is to study how blogging shapes a writer. Consider two equally talented but inexperienced and inhibited technology writers, one working in traditional media, another blogging. Press Guy and Blogger.

Press Guy is asked to cover something different all the time. He has four days to investigate an unknown (to him) technology and write a two-page article. The editor insists pieces must have a proper introduction, body and conclusion, and must be accompanied by an illustration and a sidebar or two. Press Guy doesn’t know who he’s writing for. His copy editors will decide after he sends in the piece. It doesn’t take him much time to figure out the nuts and bolts, since he’s smart, but he’s lost when it comes to explaining what this technology really means. That sort of insight takes time to observe, and time he has not. Maybe he’ll look up Google and copy a line or two, inviting the wrath of his copy editors who’ll instantly recognise the difference in writing styles. Maybe he’ll cook up something and slip it past them, inviting the wrath of a clued-in reader. An introduction and a conclusion? Huh? How do you do that? Who is reading this article? Is the reader a stay-at-home mom who got a computer to talk to her son abroad? Maybe I should explain with a simplified analogy to make it easy for her? Or is my reader her tech-savvy son, who will be offended by the analogy?

Blogger doesn’t have a waiting audience and isn’t paid to write. Blogger writes because she discovered something that she’s simply bursting to share. Blogger is under no pressure to write about something else tomorrow, or to write at all. Blogger writes simply because she feels like it. Reader feedback is immediate. There’s no waiting for the issue to go to press and feedback arriving in the mail. This absence of pressure allows Blogger to explore both her writing skills and technical mastery.
Notice the critical difference here. With traditional media, the new writer is given an audience he didn’t earn and doesn’t know how to handle. It’s a steep, painful curve. With blogging, the audience builds around the writer. The blogger grows to speak to the audience as an old friend.

There is more to this. Because there is no pay (except in the rare experimental cases or in print columns pretending to be blogs), spare time is a critical factor to posting frequency. Because of the visibly chronological sequence, there is no introduction or conclusion. Each post adds to the previous and ends with the present. Because of the semi-permanent nature—words are permanent if left alone, but may be edited or deleted at will—the blog is always a draft in progress. Published posts can be edited for grammar, fact correction or additional information, a stark departure from all prior forms of publishing. Posts the blogger is uncomfortable with can be deleted without leaving a gap.

Search engines like Google index blogs, thereby introducing another unique aspect: timelessness. Yesterday’s newspaper goes into the recycle pile, its unread contents forever lost. Yesterday’s blog post remains on the Web. Even two years later, if it was a much discussed post, it’ll turn up as a top search result, making it seem all the more immediate. The timestamp is the only indication to its age.

Most blogs allow readers to leave a comment or a link to a related post on another blog. New comments are mailed to the blogger, so they become aware of discussion as soon as it happens, even if the post was made two years ago. What would have been broadcast medium is now interactive discussion medium. Feedback is addictive—what print writer wouldn’t love to hear what his readers think?—and the fast-turnaround, interactive nature of the medium further shapes the writer. Bloggers are encouraged to make shorter, more frequent posts, so they can have a continuous stream of feedback, while also tracking exactly what post attracted what feedback. Short attention spans combined with an insatiable thirst for more information further back the case of small and frequent posts.

There is also a downside to this. The interactive nature discourages the blogger from other potentially beneficial activities not fitting in with the short feedback cycle. The star blogger could do well to take a break and explore activities that do not come with an implicit audience.

Blogging is yet a nascent medium. The semi-permanence, the public-private overlap, the interactive nature, the timelessness, the swarm of bloggers in discussion instead of a single source broadcasting to the masses, all hold promise of a medium that will as radically alter the landscape as radio and television did in their times. With its counterpart, the wiki, a similar medium that disregards chronology and emphasizes collaborative editing over individual identity, the blog is the Web’s potential realized.