shirky :: a group is it's own worst enemy

clay's got a wonderful piece on how groups can fold in on themselves and devolve which touches on some other things as well...

i can't tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. we had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. every single piece of it was right there. instead, we got geocities. why did we get geocities and not weblogs? we didn't know what we were doing.

one was a bad idea, the other turns out to be a really good idea. it took a long time to figure out that people talking to one another, instead of simply uploading badly-scanned photos of their cats, would be a useful pattern.