Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
At first I thought the Weblog Foundation was a joke, but additional reading showed me that, no, this guy’s serious. And so are the people who’ve been responding to the suggestion.
A Foundation that will do, among other things:
Provide honorariums for deserving webloggers
Provide hardware and software to support webloggers
Provide weblogging PR
Arrange corporate and other sponsors of weblogging
And so on…
And the response to the idea has been favorable — primarily from people who want to see themselves acknowledged as “professional” journalists because of their weblogging effort.
Professional weblogging. Doesn’t it just make you want to cry?
Not all the response on the idea has been supportive as can be seen at MetaFilter, not surprising that. Though I hesitate to provide buzz to a weblogging book competitor (she says with a smile) Rebecca Blood’s MeFi response is one of the best:
at this moment there are too many *excellent* weblogs for me to have time to read them all, and all of them are paying a little bit for the privilege of maintaining their sites.
so many professional writers seem to have the idea that good writers must be paid in order for writing to be worth their while–the web belies all that. *professional* writers need to be paid in order to be professional, but there are even some of them who are willing to do it on their weblogs for free.
Over at AKMA’s, Dorothea has been conducting an extensive makeover of the PreacherMan’s weblog. She’s not being paid for this effort. Instead, she’s doing this as an act of kindness, for fun, and with a sense of adventure.
Ultimately, Dorothea is acting as a member of a community, the same community that David Weinberger writes about:
Relativism need not be what we learn from our encounters with others. Respect and open-mindedness are more likely given the fact that the Internet as a technology teaches us one value more deeply than any other: the joy of being connected … which in some parlances is more accurately termed love.
Now if you’ll excuse me a moment, I have to go dust off my tin cup.