The Javascript Paradox is something I used to joke about back when I was heavily involved in Web development. At the time, there were a tremendous number of graphic designers who’d gotten a copy of DreamWeaver or learned just enough HTML to be dangerous and thereby been able to double or triple their salaries by christening themselves “Web developers.”

I usually encountered these people because they were in the midst of learning The Hard Way that creating attractive Web sites and creating useful Web sites were very different skillsets. So while my web efforts usually looked pretty bad, they tended to provide lots of functionality; theirs, on the other hand, looked great but didn’t actually do anything.

Usually, these beautiful sites would have some bits of Javascript coolness on them that provided some bit of dynamic functionality such as graphics that changed when the mouse moved over them, creating the appearance of interactivity, and I would always ask the the Web designer if he or she had written that bit of functionality themselves. “No, I copied it from this other Web site,” was pretty much the universal response (at least until DreamWeaver began to automate the creation of things like image rollovers, at which time they seemed to go out-of-vogue. Go figure.).

As best I could tell, no one ever wrote Javascript–it all was copied and pasted from other Web sites, and this was what I termed the Javascript Paradox: If everyone copies their Javascript from other places, then where does it come from? It doesn’t spontaneously spring into being, yet I could never personally find anyone who actually wrote any non-trivial Javascript. Now I know that there are sites where Javascript developers post their work, but once again, those sites seem to mostly contain re-implementations or adaptations of previous efforts, so I’m back to where I started and the Paradox still holds true.

More and more, blogs mostly comment on and link to other blogs, and I admit that I’m about as guilty as most. In some cases, this is quite defensible, if the purpose is to conduct a written dialogue or even just to provide some running commentary about that dialogue. I think that the recent discussion between Cory Doctorow and Chris Anderson regarding market forces and Digital “Rights” Management (DRM) is an excellent example of the cross-linked discussion creating a dynamic which I think probably wouldn’t exist in another format.

Nevertheless, I realized that last week, all I was doing was adding my own snarky comments about postings on Boing-Boing, but not really making any real contribution to the discussions. This got me to thinking…are blogs really nothing more than a prose version of the Javascript Paradox? So I took a look, and what I decided is that Blogs seem to fall into one of three categories:

1. News Aggregators — Sites that pull together news items in a related subject area. Slashdot is a great example of an almost-pure News Aggregator.
2. Content Generators — The rarest but most also the most useful blogs. These are people Adding Value by creating thoughts where none previously existed. Pure Content Generators are extremely rare since much of the time, some News Aggregation is necessary for the new content to make sense.
3. Me-Too Sites — These are sites that aspire to be News Aggregators, but never find any news that hasn’t already been identified by a major News Aggregator. I’m constantly amazed at (and guilty of) this tendency. These are sites that comment on other blogs, but never generate anything that someone else might want to comment on. This is my fear–that as I become more and more steeped in blogs as my initial point-of-contact for information, that I will forget that there are other ways to find things that interest me.

I mean, really, how many blog entries do I really need to see pointing to another blog entry about Time Magazine decreeing 2004 the “Year of the Blogger?” You’re now simultaneously important and invisible. This is just like my life in the Information Security business; you’ll either get used to it or get out.

Thus, I am setting a public standard for myself: If I don’t add value by posting, then I won’t. Will this hurt my posting frequency? Probably. I have a lot of ideas, but not a lot of time to type them up. That’s what RSS is for–to efficiently notify people when new content appears on infrequently-updated blogs.