It looks as though Jakob Nielsen has caused a bit of a stir in the weblog world in his latest Alertbox. He writes: “To take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material rather than simply consuming content or distributing copyrighted material”. It’s an important point, and one that is at the core of what blogging is all about. Yet, he completely fails to mention this - surely blogger is the tool to allow easy content creation for the average user. He also makes the point that most web users are poor writers/content creators (Geocities being his example). I don’t consider myself to be a great writer, but I’m trying my best to create interesting content that people might want to read. I recognise that many weblogs are simply personal diaries, regularly updated with the ‘what I did today’ kind of information. This is all well and good, and many people might be interested in glimpsing into other peoples lives (re: Reality TV/Web content as mentioned in my previous post), but I think bloggers should try and turn away from themselves a little and use their experiences to create hypertext that sparks interest, debate and above all content that inspires others to think about new things. I think there is now a massive opportunity for the average user to create intelligent and interesting web content and it is up to people to take it.