Blogs as disruptive tech

I came across a slightly-too-long but ultimately interesting article called Blogs as Disruptive Tech. The thesis: weblogs are to big, expensive content management systems (CMSes) as the PC was to the IBM mainframe. Very interesting read.

John Hiler of Web Crimson wrote the article. Web Crimson appears to be in the blog software business, but the article plays it pretty straight right up until the very end.

The more I use Movable Type (which I've been using at my work at Georgia Tech), the more I believe Hiler's thesis. Movable Type isn't nearly as flexible as, say, Vignette, but it has that enormous virtue of letting you get in and start doing useful work in a matter of hours rather than weeks. And as you find the initially small ways that you want to tweak the look of what you're producing, you find that an equally small investment of time brings results. It's a question of approach: if you want to redo your yard, do you bring in the fully grown trees and transplant them at great cost (hoping they live), or do you start with saplings and let them grow?