, or is what Thom Calandra (editor in chief of CBS MarketWatch) says in this interview completely off target in the current context? Maybe it’s just me, but I strongly believe that doing anything for a mass market on the web in 2001 is doomed to failure. His comments read, to me, like unadulterated thoughts from 1997.
A principle of the web that has emerged: if the barriers to access are low enough, users will tend to be drawn to more specialized, niche-oriented material. Weblogs are not the be-all and end-all, by any stretch of the imagination – but it’s not a coincidence that the form has thrived and that tools have been built to maintain them easily. Personal publishing is just the opposite side of the same coin in terms of the development of content online. As niche web publications built out since 1999, so did niche-focused publishing tools begin to thrive.
