Dave Barry on “Why Blog?”
View CommentsFaster than a speeding . . . toilet?
In December 2005, Dave Barry announced that he will give up his weekly humor column syndicated to 500 newspapers, but will continue writing Dave Barry’s Blog. Mr. Barry went on sabbatical from his weekly newspaper column at the end of 2004, saying he would decide in a year whether to continue. These are some of his thoughts on blogging.
You have a blog now. How is that different from your print column?
Let’s just take a theoretical example. Let’s say a toilet explodes somewhere in Wales. Now in the old days, if a toilet were to explode in Wales, it would run first in a Welsh newspaper, some reader there might see it, clip it out, mail it to his friend in Boston. His friend might say: “Oh, Dave Barry might be interested in this,” and send it to me. And weeks could elapse before the world knew about that exploding toilet in Wales. Now thanks to the miracle of the Internet, everybody can read the Welsh newspaper story as soon as it’s printed, and I get 6,000 links of it, and I put it up on my blog Dave Barry’s Blog and the whole world is alerted to the danger of the exploding toilet in a matter of minutes sometimes. So if you don’t think that’s progress, then God help you.
Information has never moved so quickly. This is not the information highway. This is the information tsunami.
Information . . . audiences and readers are moved that quickly. Imagine what a creative business thinker might do with that ability.
You cannot hear it happening, but if you are blogging, you can see it and feel it.
That’s how Dave Barry found out. Once you find out, how could you not want to be a part of it? It’s the most exciting transformation since the industrial revolution.
Liz Strauss
