Per Slate's In Other Magazines, Reason's Matt Welch writes that the big media companies are jumping on the blogwagon because they're
"history's cheapest publishing system in the world's cheapest distribution system."Not magic, just cheap and simple. That's what I was trying to say several years ago when I more actively took up the "what's special about blogging" question.
Unfortunately I couldn't put it into just one sentence, but you can see my point:
What's key here is that with both an on-line newspaper and a weblog there is a mechanism that makes it easy to update, edit and add new content.Cheap and easy means a low price of entry -- it doesn't give the same advantages to big powerful players that complex and expensive does.And when you put it that way, blogging doesn't seem so exciting, or different. But there's an important distinction -- one that has been pretty well identified by nearly every commentator: blogs let anybody do it. A blog lets you be your own little New York Times, Chicago Tribune or Associated Press. They make it easy by giving you a version of the same tools that previously only such big on-line news sources (or good database programmers) had.
That doesn't mean the media giants don't still have massive advantages. These advantages just don't buy as much in the cheap and easy realm.
Writers, columnists and commentators don't necessarily do their best work in the blog format, and doing a good, useful blog isn't necessarily as easy as it looks. A shitty blog is a shitty blog, whether it's Jane Blow or Larry King who does it. It may be cheap, but it's also cheaper for an independent to do it better, though she might not yet have the resources to attract the big audience right away... or ever.
But the potential to reach thousands or millions is there much moreso than with other media.
I may only reach an average of 190 readers a day, but that's more than I would reach otherwise, using any other medium, for the price it costs me to "distribute" mediageek. I'll take it.
I'm looking for indie-minded bloggers who've been blogging for at least a year, but preferrably 2 years or longer who are planning to attend (or thinking about attending) the Allied Media Conference in June.
Please send me an e-mail: paul (at) mediageek.org
It was bound to happen -- Google is buying Blogger, the seminal blogging ap that put thousands of weblogs (including this one) on the 'net. Logically, in the short term this will amount to a major step up in reliability for Blogger and Blogspot hosted users.
In a way this sort of fulfills part of the promise of Blogspot to become the Tripod or Geocities of blogs -- a simple, no hassle, not techie way to get your blog on-line for free. What remains to be seen is if an expanded--and probably more popular--Blogspot will suffer the same problems as the likes of Geocities and Tripod--bandwidth limitations, crazy ads and banners, etc.
I think this deal also radically reveals the fact that weblogs are simply tools, despite all the yak (meta-blogging) about blogging as journalism, democratized publishing, and on and on. The only difference about the blogging world two years ago and the blogging world now is that it is exponentially bigger at this moment. Interest in blogging has now reached a sufficient critical mass for a large 'net company like Google to consider it a reasonable business to get into -- either as a directly profitable service or a way to link people into profitable services (kind of like loss-leaders).
At the moment Google is still largely considered a benevolent company and so reception to this deal will likely be more optimistic than if Blogger were acquired by AOL or even Yahoo. Nevertheless, there will probably be those who also view this as an evil co-opt of a grassroots phenomenon.
But given that Pyra, the company behind Blogger, was always conceived as a for-profit entity--even if there wasn't much in the way of profits--this Google buyout isn't so monumentally different in essence. The only difference is scale.
Like I've argued before, the tool isn't so important as what people do with the tool. If Google extends the blog tool to more people, then the likelihood that some new, previously unheard voices will enter the mix goes way up. It also means that it gets harder for one voice to gain a large audience, even though that one voice may indeed gain a bigger audience than it once had. For instance, even if only a few dozen of people tune in to a late-night public access cable TV show, the producers of that show are still likely reaching more people than if they didn't have access to such a tool. This is true even though most people would regard that public access show as penny-ante stuff.
Popularity and mass audience are fickle mistresses, and the earliest and most popular bloggers had the luck to be big fishes in a small pond, and some had the luck of getting bigger as the pond got bigger. But the growth of audience and producers also tends to make some folks declare the end of blogging as something special. I argue the opposite is true.
The simple fact is, when we democratize the tools of mass media, we increase the number of voices and channels exponentially. The audience for each voice is arguably bigger than it would be without the tools, but it does get harder for someone to have a truly mass audience of the scale of Yahoo or even Salon.
Which leads to a very logical, but nonetheless hard question: do any of us really need a mass audience? Beyond the ego boost, what is the real purpose?
Fame, celebrity and mass audiences are the products of inequality. They're the product of a monopolization of the tools and resources for making media. When there were only 3 TV networks, anyone appearing on one of them immediately became a star. It's even sort of true with 150 cable networks. But it becomes less true with 10,000 or 10,000,000 channels.
Personally, I have no use for stars or celebrity. If expanding the accessability of media tools creates more voices and chips away at the power of celebrity then I'm all for it. Let's recognize that democratizing the tools of communication means eroding our own inflated egos.
" Most notable, the study said, were the widespread first-person accounts, which most frequently appeared on personal Web logs, but also appeared on a wide variety of Web sites -- even though that usually don't publish news."However, the journalism profession can't let the unwashed get by without some caveats, as the study warns:
"Many of these accounts do not follow the canons in fact-checking, seeking out alternative or opposing views, or attempted impartiality. They are necessarily more socially constructed, and read more like rumors, with particular aspects of the story being embellished while others are left aside.... This democratization of journalistic sources, while in no way rivaling the contacts of established journalists, provided new opportunities for individuals to explore the space of news and information more extensively. It also provided new sources of error, rumor, and propaganda."Wait, are they sure they're not talking about the mainstream press? But let's deconstruct that last sentence a bit. It says that these democratized journalistic sources "provided new sources of error, rumor, and propaganda." The way that's written it's clearly intended to inject some doubt into the reliability of non-professional journalism, provoking the sense that it's definitely more error, rumor and propaganda prone. But, that's not actually what it says. It just says that non-pro journos are a "new source" of rumor, error and propaganda. What's the old source? Why, it's the existing mainstream professional press, doncha know.
Seriously, I'm well aware of the problems that can be associated with uncorroborated, untested and unedited journalistic content. Clearly, one needs to be critical about supposed truths when reported by people and sources that you're not familiar with. But this has nothing to do with amateurs -- it has to do with recognition, reputation and, most importantly, trust.
If you invoke your critical facilities at all you learn who to trust, whether they be friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, newspapers or websites. If you read this blog and find that it doesn't speak truth, I'm going to guess you won't visit much, and certainly won't consider highly too much of what's written here. That's what I think about a lot of mainstream news outlets.
The American press has been famously responsible for inneundo, uncorroborated rumor and error. Sometimes it propagates, but a lot of the time someone else smells the bullshit and says, "hey, that's bullshit!" The difference lies more in style than in reality. The amateur often reports rumor straight, without attribution of source, or in true rumor fashion, such as "I heard that..." or "according to some guy who works for GE...." The professional reporter shrouds it differently, "An unnamed pentagon source says...." or "according to reports coming out of Afghanistan...." Which is better? Which is more corroborated? Neither. The pro has just been trained to present it as, "well I heard it, I don't know it for fact, so I'll just report that I heard it." But because we're so well trained as a public to believe official sources (or official-sounding sources), even if we don't even know who they are, we swallow the "unnamed pentagon source" better than heresay reported by an amateur. But neither is better, or truer.
The simple fact remains that the experiences, stories and truths of most people's daily lives are filtered out of the mainstream media. The only way that they will be reported, shared, heard and understood is when people seize control of the means of media production themselves. It's useless to get both a democrat and a republican to comment on police brutality in poor neighborhoods, and there are more than two sides. They aren't simple to report, and so it's better to have lots, hundreds or thousands of people reporting on this news rather than having one or two pros attempt to get the "whole story" and all of its multiple facets crammed into 750 words, 3 minutes of video, or 30 seconds of headline news.
Why do I need a reporter to report what I have to say when I can speak for myself? My goal is for that to be true for everyone.
If meta-blogging's your thing: blogpopuli.
I tried to come up with a better headline, but I didn't try too hard. So, I was thinking about blogging on my bike ride in to work this morning. I try not to indulge too much in the big meta-blogging virtual circle-jerk, but for some reason the question of what makes blogging unique was gestating in my mind.
Most of the mainstream journalism and much of the bloggers-commenting-on-blogging gets focused on content -- that is, what bloggers actually blog about. You hear about "war-bloggers" or you hear blogs explained as "links and commentary." While that's important and what initially attracts people to reading or writing blogs, I think the focus is misplaced. It's misplaced because it misses the medium of the blog.
If we consider blogs to be something new, we consider them to be a new medium; a new way to organize and convey information. If it were just a matter of content, we'd actually have a hard time telling blog from not-blog, like a plain personal home page or the press release page for some corporation. Often the element of time is identified as what sets blogs apart -- they are updated frequently. But there's nothing about a personal home page painstakingly updated daily or even hourly in hand-coded html that's essentially different from a blog in this dimension.
The comparison that most clearly uncovers the essence of the blog is actually the on-line newspaper. Such a newspaper is updated almost constantly with fresh content, much of it original and some of aggregated. But that's just a surface similarity -- it's what lies deeper that is interesting.
Underneath an on-line newspaper is some kind of backend -- some type of custom database application that allows writers and editors to easily compose and post copy at any time. That backend organizes the content chronologically and categorically as necessary, and makes it accessible on-line in some coherent fashion. Isn't that exactly what blogging software does?
Does that mean I'm throwing my hat into the blogging vs. journalism ring? No. Like I said before, it has nothing to do with content. What's key here is that with both an on-line newspaper and a weblog there is a mechanism that makes it easy to update, edit and add new content.
And when you put it that way, blogging doesn't seem so exciting, or different. But there's an important distinction -- one that has been pretty well identified by nearly every commentator: blogs let anybody do it. A blog lets you be your own little New York Times, Chicago Tribune or Associated Press. They make it easy by giving you a version of the same tools that previously only such big on-line news sources (or good database programmers) had.
So, I agree with the argument that blogging represents a democratizing force, but not for the usual reasons. Most of such talk seems to be about the ability of regular folks to comment on what they see in the already extent mass media -- it enables a "talk-back" function. But that's really subsidiary, and just one application for blogs.
What's really important is that a blog makes having a dynamic and growing website easy. Until blogging, website building tended to be more about tech skill -- the ability to manipulate code and use complex tools -- than content per se. Only the bigger, well-funded 'net companies could afford to provide a backend system (and the geeks to support it) that relieved writers from the burden of having to code their content for the web. Such was the heyday of web 'zines like Salon and Feed, for instance.
Now, the webzine is not dead, but a lot of its fire has been sucked away by blogs. Why else would Salon be creating its own blogging service? Blogs make it much less necessary for the writer, especially the amateur/non-professional writer, to rely on a middleman publisher to get her work out there. Sort of like paper 'zines, but with much easier and wider distribution. Sure, this lack of editors has its own problems, but that doesn't diminish the value and excitement of blogs.
This doesn't mean that I think blogs are the golden tool of democracy, or will single-handedly turn the table on the media giants. The power of money and monopoly is still very difficult to counter. But they do represent opportunity. Opportunity for a more diverse, heterogenous and democratic mediasphere. Note that it's more democratic, not utterly democratic. The tip to a vastly democratic Internet requires wideranging structural change to the companies and organizations that control the 'net, and they show no signs of giving up, even if they cede just enough power to little players like us.
I make no claim to be revealing some eternal truth here that nobody else has ever expressed. For all I know I'm regurgitating some other blogger's insights that I may never have even read. Are an infinite number of bloggers like an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters?
But this is what I'm thinking, and you're welcome to comment.
Earlier:
The Mainstream Is Addicted to Itself, or I Have Met Narcissus and She Is Journalist, 7/22/02 Blogging, "Warblogging," and Punditry. Is There an Effect? Is There a Point? 1/16/02 Meta-blogging? Intertwining Grassroots; Connecting the Blogging World, 12/13/01 Blogging as a Form of Journalism? 5/25/01
I'm not sure whether the whole weblog phenomenon is ready to implode, eat itself alive, or if there really is a "independent publishing revolution" at hand. Regardless, there is a new on-line 'zine called Microcontent News that might be worth checking out, if you give half a shit. It takes aim at "low-cost content formats like weblogs, community blogs, webzines, message boards, and ezines." That's certainly a good chunk of the 'net-based media that I care about.
My only hope is that the site is able to be critical, penetrating, and incisive rather than just sucking up to the usual "microcontent" celebrities. Not all apparent microcontent actually is micro, nor should it be. Like "indie creditbility" there are lots of folks who love to jump on the bohemian bandwagon when it suits them when their real intention is to ride the wave and maybe cash in.
To me, "microcontent" should really be about being truly independent, not bucking to get a big media job or get "discovered" and cash in. It's about having a commitment to doing things outside the mainstream commercial culture because that culture is fundamentally corrupt -- and it's not going to be purified by the entry of one more "independent." It isn't about celebrity; it isn't about the most well-known writers/bloggers/editors/creators/etc/etc. It's about every individual/citizen/person/being having an opportunity to communicate with someone else, their communities and the world rather than just be communicated at. That's what "microcontent news" should be about.
"I almost didn't post on it, since he's probably just trolling for hits. But although one reader called it 'offensive beyond words,' I find it mostly amusing. Apparently, despite all the Chomskyite ranting about manufactured consent, the folks at antiwar.com find it offensive when people they disagree with criticize the Big Media."Even funnier is that I stumbled on that site from a short blog entry covering a mini-debate over whether or not weblogging actually represents a serious or significant challenge to the mainstream media. I must note that all of the bloggers in this "debate" can be reasonably labeled pundits, whose professional life is centered on offering supposed informed opinions to the mainstream media. Damn, they'd better hope that blogging doesn't tear too effectively at the mainstream media, or they'll be out of work.
My own opinion (since you didn't ask), is that blogging cannot be singular force easily summed up as a challenge to the mainstream media anymore than college radio can be declared an outright challenge to commercial radio--many are, but just as many unforunately just mirror the style and playlists of commercial stations, just without the commercials. The important quality is use -- what bloggers do with the medium is what matters. The act of editing and compiling links that a particular author finds interesting or important is useful, but still really depends on the existing mass media apparatus for the content. Such a blog scores a minor hit against the mainstream when it calls attention to the truely obscure and alternative, but only if it manages to reach an audience not already aware of the sources of its links. This isn't to say that I think such a blog is otherwise useless if it can't do this--I find many such blogs useful because I don't have the time to troll and scan all the diverse sources myself on a daily basis. I do mean to point out that there have been indices and reviews of alternative and non-mainstream media for quite some time (such as the excellent Alternative Press Review) and they have not necessarily scored huge gains against the mainstream media.
I think weblogs become more powerful when they're used to not only post links but also used a forum to comment on these links, current events and other issues. And many webloggers do just that. Indeed, that's what "warbloggers" do, even if I tend to disagree with their point of view. Pundit Virginia Postrel, a participant in the aforementioned quasi-debate on weblogging, makes an interesting evaluation:
"It's the latest example of what the web has always been good for: links and specialization.... Blog writers don't have editors; they are editors."When it comes to the "mostly links" kind of weblog I just discussed I have to agree with Postrel. Editing is a useful and powerful process that has always been available to people in some form -- what's a scrapbook, afterall, but a edited compendium of items around a particular theme. What weblogging adds to the mix is an audience much larger than what the average scrapbook can reach.
But I don't think this accurately describes those bloggers who invest much more time in commentary and original content. I like to think that my own blog here is more than just links to interesting content, though you'll find that in it. I often put my effort into writing little "mini-articles" that often comment on the item that I link to, or the event or issue at hand. I also try to combine links together in a hopefully coherent narrative, taking advantage of hypertext to provide avenues for further explication that are similar to citations in academic texts. It's no coincidence that I am an academic in training--a Ph.D. student in Communications--and so I think of myself more as a researcher than journalist or editor. My intention is to add information to my links, to provide some synthesis and context to existing information -- something I believe most journalism does an inadequate job of. Whether or not I'm successful at this is an open question.
As to effect, that's difficult to gauge, no? All of mediageek.org gets about 100 - 115 hits a day -- not exactly a landslide. But that's quite a few more people than I can talk to on a daily basis (I hope I talk to more on my radio show), and that's why I do it. Alone, I don't think my blog makes significant inroads in the challenge to mainstream media, but if it's one of many then the challenge mounts. Thus a key strength of weblogging is it's very populism -- it's a tool accessible to millions of people if they should choose to use it. Yet even as a popular movement weblogging doesn't represent a major revolution until those voices drown out the mainstream consolidated commercial media. I think many more significant changes are necessary for that to happen.
Although I claim that I want to avoid too much meta-blogging, nonetheless I've commented on this topic before. Read up, if you like:
Meta-blogging? Intertwining Grassroots; Connecting the Blogging World 12/13/01 Blogging as a Form of Journalism? 5/25/01
I generally try not to turn mediageek into a weblog about weblogging, since plenty of other webloggers do that. While I do not deny the growing impact of the weblogging mov't, I also think that the more you blog about weblogging, the more you insulate the community, since such posts are of interest to fairly small (albeit growing) group--namely, webloggers. In maintaining this weblog I hope to reach a wider audience than just people in the know about weblogs. Folks who may be interested in the content you post may very well not care that it comes from a weblog, and so lots of meta-blog posts can end up being just so much boring and useless info to those folks. (I need synonyms! How many times can one use the term "weblog" in a single paragraph?)
That said, I do think that weblogs do fall into the rough rubric of grassroots media, and do merit some mention on mediageek at times when either some very important news pops up, or there reaches a critical mass of interesting happenings that can be budled together into one post.
In the last year the weblogging community has become more interconnected through the development and use of various tools. Indices and search engines like Daypop and BlogFinder provide more precise exploration for blogs than a whole-web search like Yahoo. Since a huge component of weblogging is linking, a blog enthusiast at the MIT Media Lab devisedblogdex to track what webloggers are linking to. Looking at this index reveals that memes spread across the weblogger space of the Internet pretty quickly, as a wide variety of bloggers pick up from other bloggers links to news and whatever weirdness is hot. Each day blogdex ranks all of the links on all of blogs in its database by how many blogs link to them.
Today I found out about a new feature being implemented on blogdex that's just in beta now, called the "social network explorer." When you give it a link it shows you what other weblogs link to it. But the most interesting feature is that it also returns a list of blogs that blogdex thinks are similar ("blogdex also recommends"), similar to the recommendations that Amazon returns based upon your browsing and buying habits. This feature is still in evaluation mode, and so has no input interface. To use it put in this URL:http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/socnet/index.asp?ego= followed by the URL of the site you want to see connections for. So, for mediageek, you'd put in: http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/socnet/index.asp?ego=mediageek.org
Though one comment to the blogdex newsblog observes that the "blogdex also recommends" sites don't seem very similar, I found that several of the links to be pretty appropriate. The top link is for machination.org, self described as: "a weblog digging up indymedia and independent thought in the 'mainstream'." It's a website I'm glad to have found, and not sure I would've encountered otherwise. Though it makes me wonder what the algorithm is behind this matching feature. Did it do simple word matching -- like matching "indpendent?"
The interweaving links, rampant sharing and elaborating are a few things that set weblogging apart from more conventional webpages, and especially set it apart from the mainstream media. While CNN or the NY Times will put links to outside information, they are nonetheless very concerned with keeping you on their site -- keeping their sites "sticky." Those sites don't want to direct too much traffic away from the site (noting that Google nonetheless does quite well at directing traffic away). Webloggers do not necessarily have that concern, largely because they're not big profit enterprises. If they make any money at all -- as Blogger and Metafilter are trying to do -- they only do so to make back hosting costs, or help keep the webmasters alive for all the time they dump into their sites.
This doesn't mean that I don't think webloggers shouldn't make some money for their efforts. If more webloggers could weblog for a living (or part of a living), then we'd probably see even richer content. But I do argue that weblogs really don't adapt well to big-profit areans, since some of their basic principles of existence don't jive well with the received wisdom of making a profit on the web (such as it is). This is more than a simple knee-jerk "money and profit ruins everything good" argument--although in the modern world it's hard to make a BIG profit and stay true to founding principles (if those principles were not tied to profit in the first place). Rather, the success and utility of weblogs relies on their ability to be lean and quick -- that's why meme spread so fast. Their very idiosyncratic nature -- because they tend to be personal operations -- is also one of their greatest strenghts. It's very hard to turn this into a big profit enterprise (though Martha Stewart might argue otherwise). We'll still have to see where it all goes, but for right now I'll enjoy the ride.