As you may have seen Stephen Fry has started a blog, and his first post was on smart phones and the iPhone in particular. It received so much traffic that it fell over and they're currently upgrading it. That aside, several things occurred to me after reading it:
i) It has to be the longest post I've ever read. I love this variety in blogs - they can be whatever size, tone or format you want. One of my favourite bloggers is Christopher Sessums who doesn't post very frequently, although he does post regularly, about once a week, but his posts are always thoughtful and more akin to essays or articles. But I'm also a big fan of John Naughton's blog, and John tends to have several short posts a day, that pull in interesting pieces from all over the place. You can't get that variety in many other media. It remains to be seen if Stephen Fry can maintain posts of this length though.
ii) It is incredibly well informed. For a while I wondered if it was some tech geek pretending to be Stephen Fry. In a society that seems to treasure stupidity (the recent Big Brother winner asked 'who's Shakespeare?') it is refreshing to have one who is so well informed. What other celebrity would talk so knowledgeably about 'server side apps'?
iii) It's interesting that even Stephen Fry can't have an outlet for his technophilia in traditional broadcast media, and felt a blog was the best outlet. This shows that technology and engineering are very under-served in traditional media, particularly TV. They just don't know what to do with it, maybe because it doesn't lend itself to TV very well, or because it's too complex for TV producers to get. But considering so many of us spend a lot of our time thinking about, arguing over, developing for technology, it is remarkably absent in many of the traditional media. Which is why it is covered so extensively online I guess.
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