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Meet Joe Blog

Posted by michael on from the ego-stroking dept.

theodp writes "According to the new issue of Time, we may be in the golden age of blogging, a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician. Amateur scribblers posting on the Web are becoming the tails that wag the media, says Time, citing an underperforming undergraduate at a small Christian college in Michigan as an example." Hey, if Circuits can discover USB, I don't see why Time can't discover weblogs.

10 of 343 comments (clear)

  1. journalists by mabu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If there were any real legitimate journalists left in the world Bloggers wouldn't matter, but in lieu of the mainstream media and news networks no longer having any journalistic credibility, someone has to do a little research.

    1. Re:journalists by PhxBlue · · Score: 4, Interesting

      After all, who is Joe Public going to trust the most, a fully professional New York Times employed scribe, or "Zergrush_7" ranting on his Livejournal.

      That depends on how often "Zergrush_7" scoops the New York Times. I would err on the side of the professional publication as well, but there're some bloggers out there who might as well be professionals. Matt Drudge comes to mind, though there are probably better examples.

      --
      !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
    2. Re:journalists by jayhawk88 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As opposed to semi-ethical tv news reports and political mouthpieces with agenda's to push?

  2. I suggest... by Dark+Lord+Seth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... a seperate section on Slashdot for all *blog related articles, to clearly define which articles are about blogs.

    So it's easier for people to ignore it.

    --
    Hate me!
  3. Quote from the article by umrgregg · · Score: 4, Interesting
    "Blogs can be a great way of communicating, but they can keep people apart too. If I read only those of my choice, precisely tuned to my political biases and you read only yours, we could end up a nation of political solipsists, vacuum sealed in our private feedback loops, never exposed to new arguments, never having to listen to a single word we disagree with."
    Which is pretty much exactly how I feel about my friends who watch only Fox News. ;) All joking aside, isn't this the direction that most people on the politcal margins are moving towards to get thier news? Supporting their dogma rather than for the enlightenment of facts? Who wants to (or has time to) make an educated decision without input from 'source x' these days anyway? Is it that hard to stay in the center?
    --
    NMG
  4. The Great Blog Myth by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Interesting
    a quirky Camelot moment in Internet history when some guy in his underwear with too much free time can take down a Washington politician.

    The great blog myth exposed: There are more people contributing to blogs than actually

    Care
    or

    Can do anyting about it

    What it all boils down to is like giving the AM radio dial a spin, through all those talk shows. Lotsa blather, all given with about the same amount of passion and nothing much coming of it all.

    Just go out and ride yer bike, you'll get more done.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  5. Convergence of Blogging Sites by frekydeaky · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Seems to me that there are a few different sites that are just waiting to be converged. While some of us are aspiring writers, much fewer of us have the writing skill to keep an anonymous audience enthralled. A different subset perhaps doesn't use the written word eloquently at all, and prefers to share his/her life through pictures.

    What all these sites are nibbling around the edges of, is that people want to communicate more effectively. In the last 20 years we've seen two major advancements in communication: the web-based message board (like slashdot), and instant messenger. More recently some social networking sites have come close, but none have succeeded in that perfect combination of being able to easily share your thoughts, words, and photos with everyone you care about (and everyone they care about).

    The only site I've seen that even comes close is called Multiply, and even that needs some work before it's truly powerful (I'd like to see more integration with existing communication tools, for instance).

    The next few years are going to bring some dramatic change to the way we communicate -- that's for sure. Wonder which direction we'll be taken; let's just hope it's not an "embrace and extend" strategy by Microsoft!

  6. Re:Bloggers? by mcwop · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Some blogs are good. I find them by reading or hearing about good one. Example: Forbes listed 5 good ecomnomics blogs.

    There are blogs I read regularly, and they are in some ways similar to slashdot. The blog points out things of interest, and sometimes allow comments.

    Some interetsting Blogs: Seth Godin's Blog

    Poor and Stupid

    Marginal Revolution

    EconLog

    --

    "I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX

  7. Similar to Reality TV by irikar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I see Blogs as an extention of reality TV. Your average Joe wants his share of fame while, in some cases, lacking the necessary talent to earn it. So he starts a blog and measures his popularity by the number of hits to his site.

    Mind you, unlike reality shows, the blogs are not controlled (yet?) by big production corporations and blog's primary goal isn't to make money, so at least there could be a certain sense of 'integrity' in blogs that's painfully lacking in reality shows.

  8. TechnoAntiBlogDystopia by ryantate · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I can imagine all the kvetching we're about to hear about how mundane and pointless the vast majority of weblogs and personal websites are (ala this and this), and how too many people are jumping online to post what they had for lunch or what they thought of Lord of the Rings or what they did over the weekend or pictures of themselves drinking a beer, and how it's all a bunch of crap. Someone will use the term "signal to noise ratio," someone will use the word "dreck," someone else will say "mundane."

    Here's the thing: Even the most mundane minutae of human existence if fascinating compared with the prevailing (but fading) obsession with network topology and computer technology. The Web was not invented so people could talk about the Web. You People -- the technologists on Slashdot -- have had control of the vast majority of original Internet writing for the past ten years, and it's been nothing but CSS this, or XML that, or RPC SOAP OSS GNU GPL PHP this, or PGP that, SSL HTTP HTML DOM .NET blah blah blah ... Webmonkey stuff.

    Does technical discussion have its place on a network first used to distribute physics papers and so forth? Of course. Is talking about the network by definition the most boring thing to do on the network? Absolutely. Do I like asking myself easy, rhetorical questions? YES!!!

    My point is, people are going to post baby pictures and bad cryptical poetry about their personal lives and recipes for pulled pork and shallow reviews of episodes of popular mindless TV shows, and I think that's brilliant. It means the network is finally open -- FOR WRITING -- by the masses. By people who are not engineers. It means everday people are CREATING media rather than just consuming it. You might think it's dreck, but their friends and family will get something out of it, and every now and then we'll discover someone writing (or singing or designing or photographing or filming) something brilliant and posting it on their blog, and we'll get something the likes of Viacom or Time Warner wouldn't have put in front of us if we paid them to.

    And there will finally be more to the Web than tech talk and old media shovelware.

    Just had to get that off my chest.