That anyone could start one was not the only radical feature of the blog. The form also popularized the idea of “sharing” as a means of drawing attention to things. This represented a real break with earlier models of attention harvesting, whose ideal of centralized authority was somewhere between the Third Reich’s enforced listening and the nationwide audiences of I Love Lucy: everyone gathering to listen to a single voice reaching the entire nation. Sharing was still primitive, amounting mostly to the trading of links, but it was already proving a powerful alternative means for information to spread, more in the manner of gossip or a conversation than a broadcast. It was another step toward what we now experience as the “social” proliferation of information and opinion.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 911