permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

<http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/18/whole-earth-catalog.html>
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Whole Earth Catalog as early blog
Posted by Mark Frauenfelder, September 18, 2008 3:58 PM | permalink
200809181554.jpg

Geodesic Domes, in the Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1975

Kevin Kelly, who was editor-in-chief at Whole Earth was looking at an old Whole Earth Catalog came to the realization 
that it was a 1970s version of a blog.

    As I read the dense, long reviews and letters explaining the merits of this or that tool, it all seemed comfortably 
familiar. Then I realized why. These missives in the Catalog were blog postings. Except rather than being published 
individually on home pages, they were handwritten and mailed into the merry band of Whole Earth editors who would 
typeset them with almost no editing (just the binary editing of print or not-print) and quickly "post" them on cheap 
newsprint to the millions of readers who tuned in to the Catalog's publishing stream. No topic was too esoteric, no 
degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included. The opportunity of the catalog's 
400 pages of how-to-do it information attracted not only millions of readers but thousands of Makers of the world, the 
proto-alpha geeks, the true fans, the nerds, the DIYers, the avid know-it-alls, and the tens of thousands wannabe 
bloggers who had no where else to inform the world of their passions and knowledge. So they wrote Whole Earth in that 
intense conversational style, looking the reader right in the eye and holding nothing back: "Here's the straight dope, 
kid." New York was not publishing this stuff. The Catalog editors (like myself) would sort through this surplus of 
enthusiasm, try to index it, and make it useful without the benefit of hyperlinks or tags. Using analog personal 
publishing technology as close to the instant power of InDesign and html as one could get in the 1970s and 80s (IBM 
Selectric, Polaroids, Lettraset) we slapped the postings down on the wide screens of newsprint, and hit the publish button.

    This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs 
arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.

The Whole Earth Blogalog
http://kk.org/ct2/2008/09/the-whole-earth-blogalog.php