Content Management Systems coupled with rapid syndication of content through XML or extensible hyperlink programming, permit a modularization and frame of management that is increasingly popular and preferred on the web by more and more people. This is having a dramatic effect on the development of the worldwide web and it behooves to ask about the direction these lines of development indicate for the long term of web evolution.

Briefly put, what is all the web hype about? Who cares after all about all the bloody little details of any individual's daily life or work routine? Who has the time to read through crap like this Newsletter itself unless it is someone like myself with way too much time on their hands?

I will offer several suggested explanations to this general issue:

• Content management systems offer a semi-programmed interface that allows the organization of complexity, that partly solves the problem of regularly updating content on the web, and that provides "modular" units that can be exchanged readily upon the web.
• The organization of complexity provided by content management systems offers an alternative virtual framework that enables people to organize other facets of their life and life-style and to connect this life and life-style to a larger potential web-community.
• Development of Blogs, especially upon a personal and individual level, is primarily about self-expression and symbolic self-empowerment. The statistics will probably show that, like Spam, 99 percent of traffic to any Blog will have at best only a passing and highly transient interest in the content of the Blog--only a select and small percentage of Blogs linked to highly popular content or to popular culture will enjoy a degree of success that transcends the primary purpose of personal fulfillment.
• Developing content and updating web pages has been a bit of a bottleneck problem in the development of web-based solutions, and pre-programmed content management systems have served as a means of breaking this bottle-neck problem for an increasing number of people. People do not need advanced learning or computing or programming skills to produce and develop an effective content management system that is "pre-programmed" and fairly low cost in terms of its own learning curve.
• Documentation of many factual details of people's everyday lives, though it may seem and be tedious to most other people, may be an important facet of development of a new level of information, a kind of global social history in the making and in the writing. A level of detail and extensive complexity of everyday type of information, worldwide, is now available to be freely accessed in a manner and to a degree that was never available before. This permits new avenues for research and for informational management for those willing to make the efforts and take the risks in this regard. People appear quite open to this new informational level overall, and to its availability. People are, for the most part, innately curious creatures unless this creativity has been shut-off by some form of neurotic ideology or social repression.
• Blogs and the content-management frameworks they rest upon are themselves developmental entities, and they thus embody and incorporate into their own design some of the very basic design principles of the Information revolution. Updating on a regular or intermittent basis, that allows previous content merely to be pushed down into a connected data-base, is more dynamic in content development than merely replacing static html text with other static html text. Usually, content management frameworks permit the coexistence of several programming languages in a manner that facilitates communication, not exacerbating or making more complex the learning or requirements for communication.
• Blogs as forums of communication and networking allow a new level of communication to occur and be realized. It is a level at once less formal and more human-to-human than otherwise available through bulletin board html type pages. People relate more easily and I think more "warmly" to Blog type content than to other forms or forums available through the Internet.

The Jon Stewart Daily News Show the other day did a "feature spoof" which was a satire on the "journalistic" aspects of Blogging and Bloggers. What this spoof did pay respect to was the fact that Blogging is transforming how we see and do journalism in the world. The journalistic perspective is becoming available to more people, not merely as passive recipients--as newspaper readers, radio show listeners or news show watchers, but as active participants in the news production and news mediation process. I see this trend in a positive and not a negative sense. It is nothing to do with the loss of journalistic standards or informational integrity. It has a lot to do I believe with the realization of new potentialities and realities in human populations and in the social construction and subjective/objective mediation of these collective human realities.

The trends I see in the future of this informational tidal wave are increasing degrees of sophistication, programming automation and modularization of content on the web for open and widespread distribution of content. This will translate into more complex systems readily available for a greater number and range of potential "content developers" as well as a broader range of "personalizable" options for Blog development.