Web Informant #382,
http://strom.com/awards/382.html
The increasing popularity of blogs
has me worried. My first thought was that as more and more people document
their lives, journalists may become mere curiosities: You mean you actually get
PAID to write for a living? What an antique notion. Today, I realize that the
more interesting issues concern how the trust between reader and author evolves
with this new documentary form, and how that becomes subverted and perverted as
the casual and anecdotal blogspeak takes over for
real reported work and thoughtful analysis. I'll get to this in a moment, bear
with me for now.
It could be that 2004 will be a watershed year for
the Web: from this moment, more people will be writing blogs
than reading them. If this doesn't happen, it certainly seems imminent. And I
am sure that somewhere someone has already made that assertion on their blog.
A good blog is hard to do.
It takes a lot of time to write, and to post, and to read comments and respond
to them. They provide insight into the blogger's
daily trials and tribulations, a combination of modern age diary and Kerouac
experiential writing.
Sometimes, the boundaries between a blog and a moderated discussion page or a frequent Web
column (such as this one) are hard to really define -- at least for me. One of
my former colleagues -Ð a very prolific writer and successful columnist -Ð
tried to write a blog, and lasted a week or so before
giving up.
But despite these hurdles, soon everything will be
transcribed and documented by someone online. Good indicators of this trend are
what I call clogs -Ð CEO blogs
Ð- that are done by the head honchos of Sun Microsystems (Blogs.sun.com) and the Dallas Mavericks (www.blogmaverick.com). Both have been blogging away for some time. That link to Sun's site will
lead you to dozens of other employee-based bloggers,
some of whom have thousands of visitors. Maybe this is why Sun is in such
trouble: instead of blogging away, how about selling
some more product and getting a better handle on this
Linux thing for once and for all? But I digress.
There is even blog-based
humor. (I wrote one after the Martha Stewart trials began and it can be found here:)
http://strom.com/awards/332.html
The number of blogs
attributed to our president are much more interesting to read than the
"real" one, if W. actually writes his own. My favorite prez pun blog is here:
http://www.theonion.com/images/395/article_popup2910.jpg
Okay, enough flogging of the blog
medium. Let's get on to the bigger blog issue, which
as I mentioned earlier revolves around the trust between writer and reader. As
the number of blogs increases, it becomes harder for
readers to stay with a blog long enough to develop a
rapport with the blogger. If I am a devoted reader of
the New York Times, I generally trust the stuff that I find in that venue and
come to appreciate its liberal leftist leanings on the news. The same is true
with blogs: I would tend to follow those columnists,
or personalities, that I have affinity with. As one blogger
put it, "the all-around-good-guys and platinum members of that exclusive
fraternity of techno celebs who are my close personal
friends."
But as the number of blogs
approaches the overall computer population of the planet, it becomes harder to
locate and align with the right-(or left-) thinking bloggers.
But it isn't just the sheer quantity. The bloggers themselves are beginning to see where having the training
of journalists (or those of us who pretend to be) helps. They need the
experience to make judgment calls about the information that they present to
their devoted public. Let's look at the example of Mark Willett's blog called music.for-robots.com:
http://music.for-robots.com/archives/000423.html
In this posting, he talks about accepting and
promoting an MP3 that was emailed to him from the PR department of Warner Music.
Willett's blog links to little-known bands that he
actually listens to and likes. After hearing about this episode, I found many
similarities with what I am doing here at Web Informant, where I talk about
little-known technologies that I actually use and like (or well-known
technologies that I don't like).
What is the big deal, since I get tons of free
products from vendors to write about? It is not that I am tainted because I get
all this free stuff. I write about what I use, and so does Willett. You trust
me to make the call about the technology, and I am sure Willett's readers trust
his musical judgment to make the call about the songs and artists that he likes
and doesn't like too. As it turned out, he did like the song that was sent to
him.
Well, there are some distinctions. First off, sites
like Willett's are fiercely independent and try to maintain their personal
voice and take on the music. While my musings on technology are also fiercely
independent and personal, generally the stuff either works as advertised or it
doesn't, and if it doesn't, it fails in usually interesting and amusing ways
that generate these essays. With music, one man's great band may be just
another's noise. The trick is finding the right kindred spirits who share
similar tastes.
Second, what happened was that Willett posted a link
to the song he received from Warner PR. But then he got several positive postings
to his site about the song. Upon some great sleuthing, he found out that the
messages all originated from the same IP address within Warner's corporate
network. Essentially, after sending him the song, Warner sent in comments that
appeared to be coming from ordinary readers. That is dirty pool. At CMP we have
had this happen on some of our discussion boards too.
Third, there is a difference between the computer
and music industries. With our industry, technology is part and parcel to our
daily lives and we wish it to be so going forward. The music biz is still
somewhat uncomfortable with technology. After all, these are the very same folks
that are trying to deal with students copying music over peer networks, illegal
bootleg copies of CDs from
So where does this leave the average blogger? I think eventually the better ones will develop
the same discrimination and skepticism skills that the better journalists have,
just as a matter of self-preservation. And it doesn't hurt to be adept at
network protocol analysis either so you can determine where your postings are actually
coming from. I do think that readers will also become more discriminating, and
perhaps less prolific as the blogosphere expands. In
the meantime, keep reading, and keep documenting your world.
Entire contents copyright 2004 by David Strom, Inc.
David Strom, dstrom@cmp.com, +1 (516) 562-7151
Port Washington NY 11050
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