Blogspot

In the brave new world of blogging, anyone who has been self-publishing for a couple of years is considered an elder lemon. On that criterion, Doc Searls is a grandfather of online media - as relevant now as he has been for the past 20 years, writes  John Collins

Searls has been a communications professional since 1978, when he co-founded Hodskins Simone & Searls, which became one of the US tech industry's leading advertising and public relations agencies.

In 2000, Searls was one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the first books to suggest the internet was going to radically transform business, and not just through e-commerce. Similar ideas have been thrashed out in recent best- sellers such as The Long Tail and Everything is Miscellaneous.

These days Searls has a number of roles - it "would be too normal" to have a single job, he admits in his online bio - not least as senior editor of Linux Journal. Searls also serves on the advisory boards of a number of innovative web start-ups including Jabber, Socialtext and Technorati.

He has also recently relaunched his popular blog, and his posting has been reinvigorated by a move to a new home. The Harvard web address is because Searls was last year named a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

He has already caused a stir with a post entitled "Toward a new ecology of journalism", in which he laments the passing of local newspapers and other media outlets in the US and the failure of bloggers and "citizen journalists" to fill the void.

And, after a week of patchy, over-priced internet access in a London hotel, he wonders if there is a hotel chain that offers a similar service to the reliable (but pricey) service available at Starbucks.

Searls manages to achieve that relatively rare feat of being able to blog about technology in a highly personal manner, as well as discussing more general issues, without it coming across as corny or forced.

It's nice to have one of the original maverick voices of the medium back on top form.