CJ Eller takes issue with an old Doc Searls metaphor of blogging as “rolling snowballs downhill”, and honestly it’s a metaphor I don’t especially understand, since eventually a snowball becomes so massive that it will, as Eller says, “hurtle down the hill”, so I’m not sure what Doc was getting at with this.
I guess I don’t see blogging as accumulating mass so much as, well, building a web, or, more likely, many and multiple webs. Outward but interconnected growth.
So, while Inquiry doesn’t see a difference between blogging and things that came before it, from dial-up BBSes to Usenet (been there, done that), there is a difference: the hyperlink.