Weblogs and the future

An extract (reproduced below) from Tim O'Reilly's take on what the world will be writing about (and the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs chasing) in the years to come in his article Inventing the Future.

These daily diaries of links and reflections on links are the new medium of communication for the technical elite. Replacing the high-cost, high-octane, venture-funded Web site with one that is intensely personal and built around the connectivity between people and ideas, they are creating a new set of synapses for the global brain. It's no accident that weblogs are increasingly turning up as the top hits on search engines, since they trade in the same currency as the best search engines--human intelligence, as reflected in who's already paying attention to what.

Weblogs aren't just the next generation of personal home pages, representing a return to text over design and, lightweight content management systems. They are also a platform for experimentation with the way the Web works: collective bookmarking, virtual communities, tools for syndication, referral, and Web services.