At Jeff Jarvis, who needed to be reminded, he says, that user-created content--like the new and shiny AOL Journals content--is actually old news, and just a flabor of the same old stuff from the proprietary days of AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.

Says Tim: "Remember, I used to read usage time and income reports from the entrails of the CompuServe accounting system. This isn't anything novel, nor does it have to do with the advent of blogs, social software, or anything else trendy. Same thing happened with crappy old ASCII forums, CB, and proprietary e-mail. It's related to human nature, not the specific technology."
Jim McGee's comments on this are interesting--he says "What I think may be relevant today is that new tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) are pushing forward along the dimension of context management instead of content. Perhaps what we are building with weblogs, RSS, and the rest is the infrastructure for personalizing and managing context on a new scale.