How important are Weblogs in the history of journalism, and how do they differ from personal home pages?
Brown: When a particular blog is really working, the engagement level of both the writer and the reader is unlike anything else around today. There’s a real-time type of communication, an immediate sharing of perspectives and an intimate level of creative thinking that doesn’t compare to other forms. I think that with blogs now moving quickly into the mainstream, their form will evolve quickly and will change how information is gathered and how journalists, pundits and the public communicate on fundamental levels. Barr: Weblogs, or something very similar, were dreamed up more than 100 years ago by Jules Verne. In his 1890 futuristic “A Day in the Life of an American Journalist in 2890,” he predicted that instead of being printed, every morning the news is spoken directly (IM’d?) to subscribers, who, from interesting conversations with reporters, learn the news of the day. Each subscriber owns a recorder (hard disk?) to gather the news if he doesn’t want to listen to it himself. Althoug
