Business Press Pays Attention To Blog Industry

prostoalex writes "Right after Business Week named WebLogs, Inc. one of the five Net companies to watch in 2005, the Associated Press has a feature on SixApart, the company behind Movable Type, Typepad and (after acquisition) LiveJournal. The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general."

Comments

As a blogger,

[KC9AIC]

That's great to hear.

Dot.Com Bubble again

[onion2k]

These blogging sites are great for getting stats with big numbers that will impress the money men, like page impressions, and users, and gigs of bandwidth.. but what about the revenue? People aren't actually very willing to pay for somewhere to write their blog, you can't run a multi-million dollar business on the back of T-Shirt merchandising sales, and online advertising is a business model shown to be flawed in the late 90s..

So if I were to invest in on of these companies, where would my stock dividends be coming from?

Or is it another case of a dot.com investor not really understanding what they're buying into?

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[Stanistani]

Do you think we're experiencing a mini-bubble?

What's the proper nomenclature...

iBubble?
dot-bam?
dot-pop?
dot-pup?
gumball rally?

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[natrius]

Or is it another case of a dot.com investor not really understanding what they're buying into?

It makes me cry whenever I hear people say this. I dry the tears with my Webvan stock certificates.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[grazzy]

Online advertising with big flash banners leading to a empty webshop - yes

Much has happen since... like, amazon, ebay, paypal. Wanna tell them that "online advertising is flawed"?.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[CastrTroy]

Much has happen since... like, amazon, ebay, paypal. Wanna tell them that "online advertising is flawed"?.

All those companies have real services and don't just survive off of advertisements. That said, if your blog pages are generating enough hits you can survive on just adds. What do you think keeps Google alive?

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[smittyoneeach]

blogospheric inflation dotoblogical elephantitis

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[SallyMac]

I'm not so sure you're dead on with the money part - I know that LiveJournal has a large portion of their accounts (large for me, anyways) that are paying accounts, and with blog platforms like Moveable Type you have to pay to get any of the good features. Perhaps if more companies starte delivering easy to use blogging interfaces for the average user they won't be able to charge, but for now they're making a decent bit of change.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[shark72]

"People aren't actually very willing to pay for somewhere to write their blog"

That's an extremely general statement; can you clarify? What people? Your friends? You're correct, in the tautalogical sense, that people who don't want to pay don't want to pay, but the important thing is that there are people who do.

The fact that your post was modded "insightful" shows that there are many who agree with you, but this may be similar to the "lots of people pirate music, thus people aren't willing to pay for it, thus the value of music is zero" fallacy. As the volume of piracy grows, so has Apple's business in paid downloads. And despite more and more free blogging services popping up, more people are paying. I'm able to measure this not in the abstract, let's-post-hunches-on-Slashdot sense, but by the amount of money that's put into my bank account each day.

To your credit, the "there's no business in blogging" sentiment is a popular one, but I'm just not seeing the evidence to support that.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[PerlDudeXL]

companies like Six Apart have an actual product and a weblog platform for people that can't setup their own.

selling the weblog/cms software, sponsored links or banner-advertisements on weblogging platforms seems to be a decent concept. compared to the dot.com bubble with companies without an actual product to sell.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[jseraf]

online advertising is a business model shown to be flawed in the late 90s.. Dude, there's this site called Google (something to do with a really big number). They totally are making money with ads! It's Crazy.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[Znork]

If your buisness plan can be implemented by a pimplefaced teenager in his parents basement, you should be prepared for the competition of several hundred thousand pimplefaced teenagers doing just that.

The value in such a simple buisness is just too small to support a public company as anything other than a short-term investor aberration.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[Leo McGarry]

Actually, you're a little behind the curve. Here's an example of a blogger who's selling his content on the honor system. He says he just started this week, so I'm anxious to hear how it goes over.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[ahdeoz]

Here's the thing. Someone pays $500 for a "spot ad" (1x2 inch) in your local paper with a half million circulation, but in truth only about 10% of the papers in circulation get an actual reader. Not to mention that's relative to the dozens of 24x24 inch pages. A banner add on a targetted site with the same stats should be worth much much more. But here's the real kicker. A website costs next to nothing to create, and absolutely nothing to publish. It costs millions of dollars a year to run a major paper, and millions of dollars more to print it. A website costs the price of layout tools (nothing, okay, maybe $100,000 for a fancy CMS system.) and about a hundred dollars a year to publish. Oh, and you get links.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[ahdeoz]

Slashdot pays many salaries with just big banner ads.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[shark72]

"If your buisness plan can be implemented by a pimplefaced teenager in his parents basement, you should be prepared for the competition of several hundred thousand pimplefaced teenagers doing just that."

Very astute. Being prepared, in this case, is doing a better job than those pimplefaced teenagers.

"The value in such a simple buisness is just too small to support a public company as anything other than a short-term investor aberration."

Not in this case. Those pimplefaced teenagers have been launching their own little blog hosting sites for years now. There's a metric squillion of them. Yet Six Apart (the blogging company mentioned in The Fine Article) has seven million users and growing fast. The pimplefaced teenagers are losing this one.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[Aeiri]

People are afraid to pirate music because it's illegal and the RIAA's scare tactics. I don't think there are many people that are "scared" to post on blogger.com for fear that someone would sue them.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[grazzy]

How long does it take to write something in a blog every day? If you run enough of them, and scrape togheter enough pageviews / day you'll be just fine.

For me that cap is at about 1,2m pageviews / month. And no, I'm not even having a own "real" blog. I could probably do it with much much less pageviews but I've chosen to not whore out that much.

Re:Dot.Com Bubble again

[grazzy]

Correct.

And why is that? Because they show relevant ads. Compared to the old-school ads that were just "ads" these ads are targeted to us as a "geek"-group.

Now if they'd only do geographic targetting too :)

Am I the only non-blogger out there

[mattspammail]

I never have caught on to the blogging thing. The only times I ever look at a blog is when it's sent to me as a link (usually because a pic of a hot chick accompanies it).

Blogging, IMHO, is overrated.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[ggvaidya]

Woah! Which blog is that?

I ask strictly because I want to read the content, of course :).

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[Anonymous Coward]

Blogging, IMHO, is overrated.

Would you not consider slashdot to be a blog? Sure the frontpage is controled by an select few and is considered to be a good source of news for geeks, but let's face it. This is a blog.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[BossMC]

Your post is a little short; I trust you have a longer writeup on a blog somewhere?

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[samael]

Or, for instance, when you look at Slashdot, which pretty much an archetypal blog:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[BenjyD]

It's an interesting phenonmemon, it's just not deserving of "Next Big Thing" status. I know of maybe five blogs where most weeks I will read something interesting I wouldn't have seen otherwise. The majority of them (mine included) are painfully dull.

planet.gnome.org is a good example - kind of a microcosm of the blog sphere. You get people like Miguel and Havoc posting interesting stuff about GTK/GNOME which provides an insight into the dev process you wouldn't get otherwise. You also have people who post "got up. read my email. fed baby" as if anyone cares.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[Anonymous Coward]

RE:Blogging, IMHO, is overrated.

i totally agree...

Blog = bullshit log...

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[sploo22]

...it's just not deserving of "Next Big Thing" status.

I beg to differ. Technorati currently has over 7 million blogs tracked. 3 million of those have popped up just since last October -- that's one every 3 minutes. no matter what the quality is (and I do tend to agree with you there) blogging is big.

I guess the real appeal is that it's finally an "idiot-friendly" way of publishing content. People are starting to get the desire to make the Web a two-way communication system.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[BenjyD]

7 Million! - that's a lot of stories about people's pets. I wonder what fraction are regularly updated and read. In order for there to be two-way communication, someone has to be reading those blogs ;).

Blogging is important, of course - just look at how many Slashdot/OSnews etc. stories link to a blog post these days. But extrapolating from 7 million people moving their journals online to a revolution in journalism is too big a leap for me to believe.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[yotto]

Would you not consider slashdot to be a blog? Sure the frontpage is controled by an select few and is considered to be a good source of news for geeks, but let's face it. This is a blog.

A friend and I had this discussion the last time slashdot posted a "bloggers on the rise" story. In my opinion, while slashdot may fit the technical criteria of a blog, it really isn't a blog when you consider what is really important.

What makes a blog a blog is that there is one central voice, and that central voice is a person who has opinions. Any replies to that person are largely that: Replies to that person.

Slashdot is the exact opposite. The articles and main posts are the spark to generate a much larger discussion. The important part of slashdot isn't the article, but the discussion that ensues from the article. We even make fun of people who read the articles, asking them if they're new here. In that way, slashdot is much more like usenet than it is LiveJournal.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[Leo McGarry]

What makes a blog a blog is that there is one central voice

A great many blogs have more than one author. So that's not it.

No, if anything separates Slashdot from blogs, it's that blogs usually have original content on them. Slashdot just reprints anything that anybody submits, basically without discrimination.

Of course, that doesn't mean that Slashdot isn't a blog. It just means that, if you judge Slashdot by the standards of blogs, Slashdot is a really bad blog.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[Leo McGarry]

I wonder what fraction are regularly updated and read.

All of them. Technorati has a system whereby blogs that aren't updated regularly are dropped from their index. I don't know how regular you have to be to meet the threshold; I think it's something like once a week, or once every four days, or something like that.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[Jerf]

But extrapolating from 7 million people moving their journals online to a revolution in journalism is too big a leap for me to believe.

No-one's asking you to believe that. However, "the blogosphere" becoming the source of an increasing number of stories, increasingly able to set the agenda (to an extent you may not even realize if you're not reading blogs; the evening news has been worthless for a while but for me it's now redundant for a lot of stories), and taking down various importent entities should be enough to believe that the blogosphere is having an impact.

"Revolution" may be a bit strong at the moment, but the evidence that it can get there is pretty strong.

At this point, trying to pretend that the blogosphere is having no impact is just willful ignorance, whether because you're too elitist to believe "the masses" can have anything to say (actually, it's all individuals, you know...) or because you think the word "blog" is stupid or whatever reason you have. It doesn't change what's happening.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[ahdeoz]

Actually "blogs" just post links to other content. A blog is someone making a "log" of "web" sites they've seen or heard of. An online diary is what you are thinking of.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[BenjyD]

The evening (TV) news has been redundant for a long time, anyway. Even the BBC's news is a waste of time these days. Not because of blogs, but because it's been simplified down to one-idea-per-story and news readers shouting at politicians to "answer the question".

I watched News at Ten the other day where a journalist was doing a voiceover saying "As the British military plane touched down...", as a C-5 with a big star and the letters "US" on the side landed. If they're making that kind of mistake, it wouldn't take much skill on the part of the bloggers to make them redundant.

News and current affairs coverage like BBC Radio 4 - "From our own correspondent", "PM", "Today in Parliament" - and Channel 4 - "Unreported World" - are the kind of real coverage that I don't believe blogs come near to.

I can't think of any stories where blogs have been the source, though. I guess Alistair Campbell's four-letter email tirade to the BBC almost counts.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[Leo McGarry]

Actually "blogs" just post links to other content.

You don't read many blogs, do you? Blogs haven't been about posting lists of links for a couple of years now. There are still list-of-link sites out there like Fark and MetaFilter and Memepool, but these sites are not blogs. Blogs have evolved.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[Jerf]

The evening (TV) news has been redundant for a long time, anyway.

I don't mean it the way you mean it; I mean that I saw the stories and more angles on it than the news will have, two or three days before the news has it.

Did you know that it is common practice to "release" news on Friday evening so it gets buried? I didn't, until blogs started to help that not work anymore.

I can't think of any stories where blogs have been the source, though.

Oh, yes, the mainstream news makes sure to credit the blogs, every single time.

Let's see, the "big" ones have been: Trent Lott's comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party; the reason the scandel in the news started several days after the party is that the blogs were keeping the story alive. (Of the ones I'm about to mention, this is the only one I strongly disagree with; everyone praises people at a birthday party. It's a party for Pete's sake! Praising somebody at a birthday party doesn't mean, at least to me, that the praiser was endorsing every racist thing that Strom ever did.) The massively damaging forgery of National Guard documents at CBS; again, the delay in the news was a result of nobody in the main media wanting to touch it, but the blogs forced their hands by raising very good, and ultimately unanswerable, questions. That story was 100% blog for about a week. The fake journalist accredited to attend Bush press conferances and toss softballs to the President. A lot of Iraq stories that still haven't gotten into the press because they don't involve anybody bleeding.

I know there have been a couple of others, but my memory doesn't work well this way. It's an average of maybe one every three months for the last couple of years, but it's a start. There have also been a lot of little retractions and corrections forced by the blogs that wouldn't have happened ten years ago; the LA Times has been hit by this a lot. Of course, you don't hear about those either unless you obsessively read the corrections part of the paper and there generally is no equivalent video.

News and current affairs coverage like BBC Radio 4 - "From our own correspondent", "PM", "Today in Parliament" - and Channel 4 - "Unreported World" - are the kind of real coverage that I don't believe blogs come near to.

Are you just saying that because it makes sense? I've read way more stuff about Iraq from bloggers who live there than the so-called correspondants, who are definately doing something out there, but I'm not sure I can call it reporting.

Did you know that there are like 3 "mainstream media" correspondants in Afghanistan, total? (I don't recall the actual number, but I do recall that if look at the distribution, it's like 1 AP, 0 for all of the TV networks except maybe 1 for Fox, etc. It's not a big number out there.) Don't overestimate the degree of actual information gathering the media is doing, as opposed to waiting for people to feed them. It's pretty well established, for instance, that the "correspondants" in Baghdad mostly cower in one particular hotel, and that all the bombings you hear about are deliberately conducted within several blocks of the hotel, at the optimal time to get into the main news flow in the US. Personally, I consider it a dereliction of duty to continue to just mindlessly report these bombings as if the media had nothing to do with them, when their complicity almost completely controls where and when they occur. (Loaded terms chosen advisedly.)

I wouldn't have known this, but for people living in Iraq actually pointing this out in their blogs, and I see no reason to disbelieve them, since it makes perfect sense in the light of the facts I have. (In fact, terrorists would be stupid to not do it that way.) So before someone says I don't know that 100%, all I can say is, no shit, but neither do you know 100% I'm wrong... and if I'm drawing on blogs from Iraqis living in Iraq (which is to say, Iraqis, regardless of the medium) +

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[sahonen]

Pick one at random. That's the one.

Re:Am I the only non-blogger out there

[Sebastian Jansson]

"""
I guess the real appeal is that it's finally an "idiot-friendly" way of publishing content.
"""
Hmm, yeah, that's what I don't like with blogging, any idiot can start a blog, how do you find the good ones?*

*Well, I usually only read stuff that gets sent to me or are shown on slashdot so I'm not really bothered with the problem.

Re:Just what I always thought

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!

Hoo boy...

[aendeuryu]

The article talks about the company starting to 'think big' after being approached by venture capitalists, and has some stats on the blog industry in general.

Pardon the skepticism, but...

You know, it's crazy, but you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech, yet here they are, wanting to get in on an industry where the main product is something that is already available for free. Where will the revenue, and further, the return on the investment, come from? (Firing Berman out of a cannon?) What's worse is that if there's another burst like the last one, investors are going to go back to shying away from small tech companies that actually produce something.

I think this whole thing is a result of all the press that the mainstream media is giving blogs, and the only reason why I think they're getting all that press is because the media LOVES an opportunity to navel gaze.

Don't get me wrong, I think blogging is cool and all, and offers a chance for political/media/other watchdogs out there, and there are some blogs I find entertaining, but really, I can't help but think that all that money is just going to go right down the drain, and the only thing they'll have to show for it is a bunch of webpages of people and their cats.

Re:Hoo boy...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Where will the revenue, and further, the return on the investment, come from?

I don't know, let's ask him. He seems to be doing okay...

Re:Hoo boy...

[ggvaidya]

the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money

Actually, I, Cringely predicted this a while ago. Apparently, any money the VCs collected in '99-'00 which they haven't invested has to be returned to the investors in five years, along with the VC's management fee. To avoid giving the fee back, the VCs have to invest in something - anything - and soon.

Re:Hoo boy...

[trufflemage]

the main product is something that is already available for free.

This has interesting ramifications. It's free, anyone can do it (and does) and it's spreading. The problem for the reader is sifting the interesting bits out of the sea of inanities. However, a couple of facts prevent this from being too big a problem:
1. what's of interest to me is not necessarily of interest to someone else
2. even after culling the 90%, the remainder is still a huge number. There exist enough relevant, interesting blogs to give me, the reader, choice.
3. "free" is contingent on size. A popular blog consumes bandwidth and at some point that bandwidth must be paid for. I believe that's a built-in check that will promote many small blogs over a few giant blogs. It's naturally resistant to monopolization.

The problem of too much to choose from and low quality is not really a problem but an asset(especially considering Google the Glorious to help me pick my way through): a plethora of choices is a good problem to have.

Re:Hoo boy...

[disserto]

Cringley talked about this last week. The VCs are running out of time to use the money they have, so instead of giving it back (as well as refunding the fees they charged to manage it), they're going to start putting it into everything they can.

This is both good and bad. Obviously, money is going to go into things that aren't really going to go anywhere. Money will also go into things that sorely need it and will produce something good.

The question is whether or not we remember the lessons learned just a short time ago. Will we all follow those investors and jack up the market on pie-in-the-sky dreams of hitting it big the easy way? Or will we hold back, actually research these things, and maybe play it a bit more conservatively?

Judging from the spam I get, I think more people will be into putting their life savings into the hot stocks again. Maybe the rest of us can use that to our advantage.

Re:Hoo boy...

[shark72]

"You know, it's crazy, but you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech, yet here they are, wanting to get in on an industry where the main product is something that is already available for free."

Yet the paid blogging industry is growing. Perhaps this seems counterintuitive, but it's true. I think many Slashdotters are basing assumptions on the fact of free blogging platforms (MSN Spaces being the latest of which) being readily available. I'm guessing the thought process is that with all the free solutions out there, the paid market can't possibly still be growing. But it is.

It appears that at least in this particular case, the VCs have analyzed the situation better than Slashdotters have.

Re:Hoo boy...

[ArmchairGenius]

I think the big difference between this situation and the bubble is that the investors are investing in the software and hosting companies that power blogs (for a fee - revenue stream is good), and not specific blogs (i.e., Bob's blog isn't getting 2 million dollars in investment based on his 10,000 unique hits per day).

I think investing in the moveable type company is a smart investment. You have millions of people willing to pay a monthly fee, and millions more likely to sign up in the coming months. That is a good revenue source.

And you are correct that blogger is free, but that could always change, and blogger has limits. I personally use blogger right now, but I often think of changing to moveable type because it is simply a better product with more features (but I am cheap, so I don't :P)

Moveable type is the best blogging software on the market, and again, it is a big market, so it sounds like a pretty smart investment to me.

And as for the all you will have is blogs about cats, sure there are many blogs that are like that. But there are also that are very professionally run that provide good information. Slashdot is essentially a blog for example. Instapundit, Vodkapundit, and probably a thousand more I don't know about are all run very professionally. I suspect they are both turning a profit.

I would compare blogs to magazines. There are a million crappy or very niche magazines out there. I am sure hundreds of them fail every year, and hundreds more are started every year. But no one thinks all magazines are going to go away anytime soon. If you turn out a quality product that attracts a broad following, be it a magazine, a newspaper, or a blog, you will be successful. If you have a poor quality product about a topic no one cares about, then you won't.

Re:Hoo boy...

[Anonymous Coward]

What I think many /.ers don't believe, is that this growth is going to be enough to create/sustain "the NextBigThing".

Sure, Six Apart and others will become somewhat bigger, but personally I really can't see them becoming even close to 'huge'.

I think these tools/services will - sooner rather than later - be incorporated into the application fabric of the PC/intarweb. E.g. one or several "1GB free webspace @ webhostX" controlled by a set of free apps/plugins (RSS-feed reader/creator + del.icio.us-style bookmarks + blog editor, etc.).

It's already well under way to become part of the Mozilla Suite (plugins), or maybe your PIM (Chandler, etc.) will do it, or any other framework.

It happened to email, we now have IMAP/POP access and tweak/control the service at the edge - no need for a centralized entity (like a weblogging company).

Re:Hoo boy...

[Leo McGarry]

the main product is something that is already available for free.

It's not free. Yes, you can sign up for something like a Blogspot account for free, but your site is going to be hard to use and difficult to customize. The point here isn't that the services are available for free; the point is that they're cheap -- practically anybody can afford $5 a month. And for only a little more than that, you can have your own dedicated server at a data center like Hosting Matters. It's incredibly easy to make $5 a month in ads and tips, and apparently it's even becoming the norm to sell content through a micropayment system.

Re:Hoo boy...

[Edmund Blackadder]

Oh, believe me, the VCs will come out on top of this. Remember they are not invested in these blogging companies for the duration, only until a "liquidity event" occurs.

All they need to do is pubblicize the companies until an IPO or a buyout and then they can walk away. Eventually people will realize that blogging software is not that hard to write and that these super high priced companies have very little advantage over any competent developer in their basement. But by that time the VCs will have walked away with their money.

hmm

[improfane]

SixPart Blog(s) - "You will be a assimilated -- Resistance is futile!"

Reality Check

[Xpilot]

The internet is shit

Seriously, why is such a big deal being made of blogging?

Re:Reality Check

[nametaken]

I spent a long time wondering why everyone made a big deal out of it. All I came up with is, for every 4,000,000 blogs published, 1 is made by someone with something important and meaningful to say.

The bar for posting something on the web has been lowered even further than it used to be. Of course this means (now more than ever) any dumbass is putting up crap to see on the internet.

The upside is that a handful of people that have something important to say can do so with ease.

Also, these "blogs" generally have relatively strict templates to keep the material organized in such a way where people can actually read what people post without having to scroll past 8 pages of animated gifs on a geoshitties page.

Re:Reality Check

[stil__maar]

The creator of the website your pointing to there seems to have an incorrect idea of what the internet is.
The internet is way more than websites or usenet postings.

Re:Reality Check

[CrackedButter]

That website is either the best on the net or it is the typical "I'm trying to speak out against the tide in my own ironic sort of way so I can distinguish myself and be noticed."
But it has a point either way.

Re:Reality Check

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure the internet is shit but websites that serve xhtml as text/html definately are!

Quick someone register theinternetisshitisshit and serve html3.2 as text/plain, just to make that point.

Re:Reality Check

[Leo McGarry]

All I came up with is, for every 4,000,000 blogs published, 1 is made by someone with something important and meaningful to say.

That's not actually how it's turning out, though. See, out of the 7 million blogs out there, there might be only 10 that are even remotely interesting to you. Somebody else has his own 10. And somebody else has his 10. The net result is that every blog has an audience.

Ed Driscoll had an article on Tech Central Station about this a few weeks back. He talked about the fact that the vast majority of blogs operate in a high-trust environment. A blog is read by the author's friends and family, his co-workers, people in his town, people who share his interests. A blogger who's really good will pick up some audience on merit, but generally his audience is gonna be limited to people who know him, either personally or professionally, directly or indirectly. A big blog might only have an audience of a few thousand people a day, but every one of those few thousand people trusts the blog's author.

See, you're thinking of a blog that's only of interest to a few hundred people as a waste of space. That's the wrong way to look at it. Instead, you need to look at it as a six-degrees-of-separation type thing. Consider the Eason Jordan story from last month. I know about that because I read about it on a blog written by a woman I work with; she heard the story from another blogger she collaborates with; she heard it from a Congressman, who was there.

Compare and contrast to the old model of news distribution where a reporter writes a story which may or may not be true, and that story gets distributed by a wire service that you may or may not trust, to end up in a newspaper you may or may not read.

Think about the tsunami videos. Within hours after the Indonesian quake, home videos were available on the Internet, passed from hand to hand from the people who shot them to bloggers who shared them with friends. Within a day, the whole world had seen them. It was a classic "tell two people" expansion.

Blogs with small audiences are not failures. They're part of the web. See?

Re:Reality Check

[nametaken]

I realise different content has different value to different people... but I have a hard time assigning real value to Jane Doe's, "I had such a crappy day cause Bobby doesn't like me" posts.

I know these aren't the sorts of blogs most people think about, but it seems like that represents the vast majority of content we get in blogs.

I'd call your coworker's blog one of the few that had real content on it. That makes it the one in a million that is worth anything.

And of course, the idea of having access to unfiltered information is always good, but there were always outlets for that on the internet. I'm just saying the bar has been lowered (yet again) for the expertise necessary to create content on the web. I should say, I don't suppose that's really a BAD thing.

As for tsunami stuff, I guess we'd have to see how many people would have seen those videos without visiting Bob's Blog. I seem to remember alot of home video on TV alone, right after it happened.

Re:Reality Check

[tacokill]

The link you posted is rather harsh. To me, the Internet is the greatest "pooling" of human knowledge ever created in the history of the world. Ever.

To decry it as "shit" is just a bit harsh. Yea, there are some internet dead-ends and cesspools, but overall, the world's knowledge is there for you. You just have to find it...

Perhaps you aren't looking in the right places?!?

Re:Reality Check

[Leo McGarry]

I have a hard time assigning real value to Jane Doe's, "I had such a crappy day cause Bobby doesn't like me" posts.

They are tremendously valuable to Jane's friends and family, and to anybody who enjoys the voyeuristic rush of reading somebody else's diary. Of course, Jane's online diary becomes massively important to the whole world as soon as she posts, "I had such a crappy day because Bobby doesn't like me, and holy cow look at that giant tsunami!"

The whole point of blogs is that they comprise a vast, interconnected web ... a world-wide web, if you will. The fact that the information on an individual blog isn't important to you doesn't mean it's not important to anybody else. Nor does it mean that it won't become important to you tomorrow.

Anything that allows more people to share more information is a good thing, yes?

I'm just saying the bar has been lowered (yet again) for the expertise necessary to create content on the web. I should say, I don't suppose that's really a BAD thing.

And yet you do an admirable job of making it sound like you think it's a bad thing.

As for tsunami stuff, I guess we'd have to see how many people would have seen those videos without visiting Bob's Blog. I seem to remember alot of home video on TV alone, right after it happened.

Heh. Where do you think the TV networks got the video?

Re:Reality Check

[corblix]

Quoting from "The Internet Is Shit" (emphasis mine):

All manner of pointless and irritating content is continually poured down the infinite hole of data, unfiltered and over-appreciated. In accepting freedom of speech, we can't hide from its consequences - which in this case is millions of terabytes of unreliable information, badly designed and clumsily written. ... We need to start again. We need to stop saying how wonderful things are. We need to openly, truthfully and respectfully admit that the internet itself, in almost all of what's been done with it, is shit.

Indeed. But the key word here is "unfiltered".

From the earliest days of the web, people have posted pages of links. Why? To point others to the good stuff. In short, to filter.

Usenet is in such a mess because it has poor filtering mechanisms. People love Google because it is a very good filter. People hate Spam because it is hard to filter. People love good blogs because they recursively filter each other. And the whole point of Slashdot is a new way of filtering.

So, yes, 99.999% of the internet is shit, but that doesn't matter if you are only looking at the good 0.001%. We don't need to start over; we need to filter better. And we are doing so. It is much easier to find things on the net than in was 10 years ago. There is more crap on the net, though, so, although our ability to filter is greater, the need for filtering is also greater.

So look for better filters. Create them. Use them. Share them with others. Because, contrary to what "The Internet is Shit" says, we can accept freedom of speech, and hide from its consequences at the same time.

Re:Reality Check

[Scroatzilla]

I'm the first one to admit that I really don't care about blogs. However, this "internet is shit" thing seems to be some kind of ignorant manifesto of a dejected librarian or something. Cut me a break. I could stomach it only by thinking what that site really means is "the commercial internet is shit" and, even then, it's exaggerated.

IMHO, the bottom line of the Web is that it's an electronic representation of how we socialize as human beings, at a global scale, that is cheap enough to reach into corners of the world that most people didn't know existed. This peaks my "sense of wonder" (which according to "the internet is shit" is something we've lost as a society or something).

The argument you make is from some kind of old-fashioned snobbery stemming from the narcissistic point of view that dimisses other people's interests as mundane. Thus, you have missed the entire shift in the way the human race communicates, which is a shame.

The ubiquity of blogs has surprised me because of my own laziness when it comes to finding interesting bloggers. Whether or not there's a whole "industry" to be made by blogging is, in my non-business-saavy option, doubtful. But, like discussion boards, blogs are perfect for niche interests and are here to stay. Anyway, if the "internet is shit," why waste your time posting to slashdot?

Kiss your karma goodbye!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that posts anything along the lines of:

"What's so big about blogging?"
"I don't get it."
"Blogging is for losers."

Can kiss their karma goodbye. Slashdot is filled to the brim with a vocal contingent of blog- evangelists that through years of posting on Slashdot have a cornucopia of mod points to mod you down with.

Good luck to you!

And now...

[Anonymous Coward]

What rolls down stairs, Alone or in pairs, Rolls over your neighbor's dog? What's great for a snack, And fits on your back, It's Blog..blog..Blog!! ... It's Blo-og, Blo-og It's big, it's heavy it's wood! It's Blog, Blo-og It's better than bad It's good!!! Everyone wants a Blog, come on and read my blog!

By Blamo

BLOGS

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man, blogs! How about that eh??

let blogs replace mass media

[trufflemage]

From the article:

The potential of blogging itself elicits strongly divided opinions.

Denizens of the so-called blogosphere believe the practice is destined to revolutionize the way people distribute and get information, increasingly marginalizing traditional mass media outlets. ...

Critics, though, view all the fuss about blogs as the latest bout of Internet hyperbole, one that will eventually fade away ones readers realize they are rife with inaccuracies and mundane minutiae.

The critics are correct--reading blogs means reading a single writer's private quirks--but that works to the reader's advantage as well as disadvantage. Who wants to get all their information from a single, monopolistic, sensationalistic source? That's how I view the local television news--to be fair, they make an attempt, but to me it's obvious their bottom line is ratings. So today we have an alternative model for the dissemination of information (or rather, many models), and one of the sturdiest is the blog.

I'm reminded of analogies I've heard made between modern AI computing algorithms (ie, neural nets) and the human brain, in which there are so many tiny, self-contained fundamental units (connections, say) that a great many of them can fail without destroying the performance of the whole. Robust & degrades gracefully.

Blogs may forge that sort of network online. No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses, because the masses are not drinking from a single spring. Each person is reading a finite number of blogs and processing and making their own blog. Everyone is (gasp!) thinking for themselves.

I like the direction this is going....

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[Tethys_was_taken]

Each person is reading a finite number of blogs and processing and making their own blog. Everyone is (gasp!) thinking for themselves.

Do not think, even for a minute, that this will happen. We (the people) will just find a different way to be sheep. Some blogs will get more attention than most, and everyone will again be thinking the same things, controlled by similar people.

A medium may encourage free-thinking, but people don't seem to like it too much. Most people prefer to be told what to think while going about their lives.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[LtOcelot]

Unfortunately, there's a major downside to having a plethora of news outlets: each ends up catering to a narrow target audience, and people tend to gravitate towards those outlets which slant the news in keeping with their own personal biases. Why bother confronting uncomfortable issues when you can switch to a blog that spins them your way or ignores them altogether?

No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses

The greatest fault, dear trufflemage, is not in our stars, but in ourselves....

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[MtViewGuy]

Blogs may forge that sort of network online. No longer will it be easy to mislead the masses, because the masses are not drinking from a single spring. Each person is reading a finite number of blogs and processing and making their own blog. Everyone is (gasp!) thinking for themselves.

Indeed, in the political realm that is already happening, thanks to the fact blogs can outrun the so-called mainstream media when it comes to information dissemination and fact-checking quite easily. It was the blogosphere that pretty much destroyed the reputation of CBS News when a lot of fact-checking from multiple blogs showed that the 60 Minutes II story claiming inconsistencies with President George W. Bush's service with the Texas Air National Guard were based on fraudulent memos.

In short, a well-written blog can act as a means to fact-check all news sources, which means news organizations from now on better be much more careful in disseminating the news, especially if the organization claims to be non-partisan.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[Leo McGarry]

Everything you said here is true, but it's wrong to think of blogs as replacing mass media. There's still a big place for mass media. Blogs provide an adjunct, picking up and disseminating stories that otherwise don't get covered, picking apart unfair coverage of stories (or utterly made up stories), and providing a network by which ordinary Joes can share their opinions about stuff. But the mass media isn't going to go away because of blogs. It's going to have to change its model a bit, become more accountable and responsive, but it's not going to go away.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[Leo McGarry]

You're a fucking elitist asshole, and what's more, you're completely wrong.

Everybody has opinions. Having an opinion is one of the easiest things in the world to do. Go try and find one of these "sheep" you oh-so-smugly talk about. Go try and find somebody without an opinion. You can't. They don't exist. Everybody has opinions.

Are most people motivated enough to go to a lot of trouble to express their opinions? No, they've got better things to do with their time. But that's where outfits like Six Apart come in. By making blogging easy and cheap, they've lowered the activation energy of the reaction. Blogging is no more difficult than sending an e-mail now. (In fact, many blogging services offer an e-mail interface. They call it "moblogging," for "mobile blogging.")

What does this mean? It means we've got a world full of people with opinions. Of those people, some fraction have access to a computer and a few dollars a month to spend. These people are blogging. They're blogging by the millions.

There's a blog, I can't remember the name now, run by a Christian missionary woman in Kiev. She used to write about her missionary work, the friends she was making, what life was like in the Ukraine. It was basically a letter to her friends and family, delivered in blog form.

Then, one day, the people of the Ukraine had an election, and it didn't go well. The people took to the streets, dressed in orange, to demand a fair election. They were lining up and camping out by the thousands ... right outside this missionary's window.

She took some pictures. She talked to some people and wrote down what they said. During a week when the Western press were running hundred-word blurbs about the Ukraine on the back page of the world section, this woman was providing in-depth, on-the-spot coverage of one of the biggest stories of 2004.

Was she one of the "sheep" that you speak of so dismissively? Or was she one of the "free thinkers" you seem to like so much? Neither! She was just a woman with a camera and a desire to tell her friends what was going on in her life. That she happened to be an eye witness to one of the most important events of this young century was just a coincidence.

People like you piss me off, frankly. You're oh-so-smug, oh-so-convinced that only you are enlightened and everybody else is a "sheep." The truth is, you're either completely ignorant of or deliberately choosing to ignore the things that are happened around you that put the lie to your "us and them" dichotomy.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[Tethys_was_taken]

Do you trolls even bother to read anymore?

Anyway, I have time and patience...

Everybody has opinions. Having an opinion is one of the easiest things in the world to do. Go try and find one of these "sheep" you oh-so-smugly talk about. Go try and find somebody without an opinion. You can't. They don't exist. Everybody has opinions.

Who claimed that we don't have opinions? We (the sheep) do have opinions, which are shaped by the people we pay attention to. That was my original claim. You have not refuted it.

Was she one of the "sheep" that you speak of so dismissively? Or was she one of the "free thinkers" you seem to like so much?

I know nothing of this lady, but she is most definitely a free thinker. She did what very few people around her did.

only you are enlightened and everybody else is a "sheep."

My post said: We (the people) will just find a different way to be sheep

I put myself in the same category knowing fully well that most of my thoughts are influenced by those around me. On most issues, I do not know enough to have an opinion, but if necessary to have one, I will choose that of the people I know. I did not try to introduce a dichotomy, since I knew that I can't. ( Human society doesn't provide fine-grained locking :) )

You're a fucking elitist asshole, and what's more, you're completely wrong.

Statements like this do not add to an argument, or add to the issue at hand. Oh wait, you don't care about that.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[Leo McGarry]

Who claimed that we don't have opinions?

You, with all your yabber-yabber about how people don't think for themselves. Wanna back off that position, Sparky?

That was my original claim. You have not refuted it.

Oh, great. Yet another kid who thinks he's on his high-school debate team. Well, that goes with the smugness and the sense of superiority.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[Tethys_was_taken]

You, with all your yabber-yabber about how people don't think for themselves. Wanna back off that position, Sparky?

You completely missed the point.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[Leo McGarry]

No, I dare say you're the one who missed the point. You need to drop this "you're all sheep, I'm better than you" attitude and recognize that everybody has something to contribute. You need to realize that other people are just as thoughtful, just as insightful, just as worthy of being heard as your own precious self.

You're an arrogant son of a bitch, and unfortunately, with all your "Oh, you missed my point" chatter, I see no sign that that's going to change.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[ahdeoz]

But where do people get their personal biases? That's what is called thinking... Making decisions based on values. Either people will gravitate to outlets that are biased toward what is good and right, or they will gravitate towards outlets that flatter their personal vanity. No one will flock to what they find offensive and wrong. The decisions that people make about what to gravitate towards were called "morals" once.

Re:let blogs replace mass media

[trufflemage]

We (the sheep) do have opinions, which are shaped by the people we pay attention to.

I think you're saying that it's very difficult to form a truly original opinion. I notice in myself occasionally (probably far less often than it actually happens), a tendency to make a passionate statement for a position that I swallowed whole from someone else. I read a lot, and those ideas that go in my eyes tend to work their way out my mouth or fingers. And I still believe, or want to believe, that I think for myself! The truth is, that's hard to do.

I see two reasons this sheep-like tendency will not be corrected by the advent of the blog:

1. No one has time to learn about and think about every issue in sufficient detail to form an opinion; therefore everyone will be led by someone else in at least some category (or at best, led by their own previously established blanket principles for handling that sort of issue).

2. Blogs are, like word of mouth and every other medium, at the mercy of infectious memes. :) I suspect that ideas will work themselves through a network of blogs in a process similar to the life-cycle of an email humor piece that everyone forwards to their friends until the whole world has seen it six times.

So in spite of the optimism of my post above, I don't see blogs as the panacea for the world of information. But I do see them as a step forward because each one is limited in distribution, open to comments from readers, and the number of blog writers is increasing. I see blogs as analogous to hundreds of coffee-shop conversations as opposed to a single lecture from a podium (newspaper/television/radio).

And the potential is really extraordinary! I love the story of the missionary lady who blogged in the Ukraine. I don't think I appreciate yet just how cool and revolutionary this is. She wrote a historical document, a primary source, and it was available instantly worldwide. In the centuries when literacy itself was rare the occasional monk would write down his thoughts and we treasure every scrap of parchment that has survived the ages. At the time he wrote, some miniscule percentage of the population would have been sufficiently educated to read, but only a handful of persons would presumably ever lay eyes on the physical document. That situation was revolutionized by the printing press and I guess a revolution of similar proportions is represented by the internet. A blog is potentailly a primary source documenting a real person's real experiences, firsthand. Thus the information gleaned from reading such a blog is one step more direct than information gleaned from a traditional news source.

Blog entrepreneurs

[mparaz]

More people are looking through cashing in on their blogs, like through Adsense, and other schemes like BlogKits BlogMatch which show that AdSense doesn't work for blogs. Then we have the commercially sponsored blogs from companies like Gawker Media - such as Lifehacker for Sony.

Here's some analysis on commercial blogging. (Yes, it's from a blog!)

businessweek is a day late

[rifftide]

FORTUNE ran a cover story on the impact of blogging on business last month, featuring Six Apart among others.

Not long after, Bill Gates did an interview with Gizmodo. Coincidence? (Gizmodo was not featured in the FORTUNE article - Engadget and Microsoft's own Bob Scoble were).

Re:businessweek is a day late

[xenocide2]

The owner of gizmodo has his head up his ass, and I feel sorry for the guy who gets paid 14 thousand a year to live in NYC and write all that however many days a week he does it.

bleh

[operato]

tbh they mustn't have done too bad if people are actually walking up to them to back them instead of the blog sites going to investors.

I got £45bn to advertise IBM on my blog

[Realistic_Dragon]

20/2/2005

Woke up. couldn't find any clean underpants because the lighbulb is broken. Maybe the underpants gnomes stole the lightbulb to cover up the missing pants until they made their getaway.

19/2/2005

Posted in my blog today.

18/2/2005

Man I shouldn't have eaten those beans. I had to destroy all my underpants.

VCs love a bubble ...

[verus vorago]

"you'd think that after the dot.com bubble burst the venture capitalists would be a little more careful with their money when it came to tech"

I *strongly* suspect that venture capitalists (and brokers) made a killing during the dot com era regardless of the collapse.

It's the bigger fool idea - each person buys at stupidly inflated prices assuming there is an even bigger fool who will buy after them - but the VCs get in first so there was very often much bigger fools begging to be ripped off.

I seriously doubt that another bubble is going to be seen as anything but an opportunity by VCs.

Re:VCs love a bubble ...

[pod]

Most of the money VC companies made came from their managemtn fees, which can sometimes b outrageous.

gmail invites

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nothing new. The rebulican party has been paying bloggers big bucks for some time now. "Grassroots" propaganda. Dig deep into the "Jeff Gannon" story for more details.

On another note, I have gmail invites for the first 50 who ask at safety.account@gmail.com

Re:gmail invites

[strelitsa]

A poster at conservative website FreeRepublic.com is credited as first discovering evidence of CBS News' and Dan Rather's clumsy attempt to rig a US Presidential election by exposing the incredibly bad Bush Killian memoranda forgeries that CBS had "authenticated". Here is the historic "Post 47" that exposed Rather's perfidy:

Post # 47 To: Howlin

Howlin, every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman.

In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts.

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

I am saying these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old.

This should be pursued aggressively.

47 posted on 09/08/2004 8:59:43 PM PDT by Buckhead

CBS executives Betsy West, Josh Howard and Howard's deputy Mary Murphy as well as producer Mary Mapes acted as human shields for Rather with their jobs. Memogate was only the most recent attempt by supposedly unbiased "journalists" at CBS to subvert the will of the American voter. And bloggers were the first ones on the scene to expose CBS' treachery.

Of course, Dan Rather has a documented history of bias against Republicans. Rather's refusal to cover Juanita Broderick's rape charges against former President Bill Clinton during Penisgate was another black eye for CBS and its bell cow. Rather's incredible claim that the story was "an intrusion into Clinton's private sex life" was both disgusting and horrific. Rape is a crime even when committed by a sitting President, not a political football. Further, Rather's Jan. 25, 1988 interrogation of then-candidate George Bush trying to link him to Iran-Contra was a harangue so vitriolic that even Mike Wallace said his co-worker had gone too far, and CBS affiliates called the Bush campaign to apologize for Rather.

Along with Michael Moore's nazi-esque propaganda film Fahrenheit 9/11 and the stunning testimony of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth documenting John Kerry's cowardice and misdeeds during the Vietnam War, Dan Rather and Mary Mapes' evil machinations will be remembered by history as one of the primary reasons that George W. Bush won the 2004 election. The American people can smell a skunk in the woodpile, and Rather's shameful curtain call in March when he retires as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News means that they finally, thankfully, have started to pay attention to the rampant liberal bias that infests the American "old media" television networks.

Re:gmail invites

[JeffTL]

Them and the Democrats both. The Dean presidential campaign was bribing bloggers with kickbacks -- commentators and amateur journalists are especially susceptible to this sort of stuff (back to the red side of things, Armstrong Williams makes a good example). The reason the politicians are so big on blogs is that they provide an outlet for manipulable amateur journalists. Bribing the paper for an endorsement is the oldest political dirty trick in the book, and now it's a lot easier to do it, particularly if you can get a well-read blogger to start cooperating. (p.s. I supported Kerry, and I haven't heard anything yet about his campaign bribing journos, though I wouldn't be extremely surprised)

Re:gmail invites

[klang]

-1 off topic

I think everybody has 50 invites .. I've been trying to use mine, but they keep refilling .. Furthermore I've been invited by the Gmail Team .. the result of signing up for further information 8 months ago ..

even this initiative has 291,820 invites available to share. ...

Anybody who doesn't have a gmail account by now, hasn't figured out how to write gmail account invite in google ..

Re:gmail invites

[Leo McGarry]

The rebulican party has been paying bloggers big bucks for some time now. "Grassroots" propaganda. Dig deep into the "Jeff Gannon" story for more details.

Yes, please. Dig deep into the Gannon story. Because when you do, you'll find that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Republican party, or with bloggers, or with anybody paying anybody for anything.

I wouldn't have bothered to reply but for the fact that some Slashdot moderator with more points than sense felt the need to call this completely false post "interesting." Is "interesting" a code word for "big fucking lie" these days?

Re:gmail invites

[Edmund Blackadder]

Of course it has nothing to do with the republican party. Any idiot with a fake name can get into the White house and ask the president questions at news briefings.

Re:gmail invites

[Leo McGarry]

He didn't use a fake name. He gave his real name, and published under a pen name. Just like lots of reporters do. And yes, any reporter who asks can get into the White House and ask the President questions at press conferences. That's called having a free press.

(Point of order: the events where the President stands up and takes questions are not briefings. They're press conferences. The President doesn't participate in the regular press briefings.)

Go read this. Unless, you know, you just don't give a damn about primary sources.

Re:gmail invites

[Edmund Blackadder]

Right, and that's why he was identified in C-Span under a fake name, because he "gave his real name". Publishing under a pseudonim means exactly that -- publishing under a pseudonim, not providing a pseudonim instead of your real name in real life situations.

And not any reporter can get into the whitehouse. There are hundreds of good reporters that do not get into the white house no matter how much they ask. And those are reporters who can show better journalistic experience than being gay whores (see http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called -jeff.html)

And from the reporters that are allowed at the white house there are many experienced reporters that are not allowed to ask the president questions (including helen thomas who has been reporting at the white house for 40 years and was recently sent to the back row and ignored by bush).

Re:gmail invites

[Leo McGarry]

Publishing under a pseudonim means exactly that -- publishing under a pseudonim, not providing a pseudonim instead of your real name in real life situations.

Um. I don't think you really have the foggiest idea what you're talking about here. He was identified on C-SPAN by his pen name because that's the professional name he uses. Just like how Mara Liasson uses her maiden name instead of her married name, because that's the name under which she works.

Gannon's day pass was under his legal name, not his pen name.

And not any reporter can get into the whitehouse.

Not so. All you have to do is get your name on the list. (And it's two words: "White House.")

And those are reporters who can show better journalistic experience than being gay whores

Ah, yes. Now we're getting down to brass tacks. Now we're getting down to the meat of your argument. Gannon didn't belong in the White House press room because he's a fag. Right? That's your point, isn't it?

And from the reporters that are allowed at the white house there are many experienced reporters that are not allowed to ask the president questions (including helen thomas who has been reporting at the white house for 40 years and was recently sent to the back row and ignored by bush).

First of all, you do know that you're talking about Helen Thomas, here, right? By far the most abusive reporter to ever set foot in the briefing room. Second, she's no longer even in the press room. She quit covering the White House and became a columnist.

Second, during a press conference, every reporter in the gallery gets to ask one or two questions. (It's usually one; sometimes the President bends the rules to make it two.) You go in seating order from back to front and left to right.

So basically, everything you said here was wrong. Try reading the article I gave you instead of getting all your news from gay-bashing liberals (how's that for a contradiction in terms) who are motivated solely by their hatred for the President.

Re:gmail invites

[Edmund Blackadder]

Now I am really pissed, but to think of it, I deserve everything that I get because I got into an internet argument with an idiot. And as it often happens in these situations, apparently everything that I am saying has been proven wrong by various random blanket assertions (with no support).

And now I have two choices (i) shut up and thus indirectly admit that every thing I say is wrong, or (b) spend countless hours reasearching the white house press handling procedures on the internet in order to come back with a well reasoned argument. And what is the reward for these countless hours -- winning an argument with an idiot.

So Instead I will just repeat things that I already know. I already know that at least one AP journalist says that they saw gannon wearing apress pass that said gannon. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/10/ganno n_affair/

I also know that given obvious consideration to the way the real world operates it cannot possibly be true that every person that wishes to ask Bush a question gets to ask him a question. According to you, anybody from any kind of news website can get into the white house and once there, Bush will answer everyone's question. I REALLY doubt this is true. Because if it were true considering the sheer number of news organizations in the states, Bush would never stop answering questions. In fact from what I have seen from the White house press coverage bush answers only a few questions. So naturally there is some filtering going on, and Jeff Gannon passed that filter even though he has minimal journalistic credentials.

I knew you would accuse me of gay bashing. I only pointed this out to show Jeff's obvious lack of journalistic experience. Also, prostitution gay or straight is illegal and, in my opinion, highly immoral. I also mentioned this because it is a nice irony -- the guy used to literally suck cock for a living and now he does it figuratively.

As far as you correcting my capitalization on an Internet post, the only thing I can say is I hope it makes you feel good about yourself.

Concerning Helen Thomas -- I guess thats what they call good journalist nowadays, abusive. Well you may call her abusive but I call her a journalist that knows how to do her job. Journalists are not there to make their interviewee's feel good. Of course I can understand how a former gay whore can be confused about that last point.

Re:gmail invites

[Leo McGarry]

at least one AP journalist says that they saw gannon wearing apress pass that said gannon

Except Gannon never held a press pass. Instead, he was given a series of day, or "A", passes, none of which have anybody's name on them. Your "at least one AP journalist" is either misremembering, or lying.

According to you, anybody from any kind of news website can get into the white house and once there, Bush will answer everyone's question. I REALLY doubt this is true.

Kay. Because you're uninformed about how the process works, you jump to the conclusion that the only way Gannon got into the room is through shenanigans. Do you realize how absurd that is, or are you operating under ignorance? Has the thought, "Gee, I'm uninformed, maybe I need to learn more before jumping to a conclusion" ever rocketed through your vast and empty mind?

I knew you would accuse me of gay bashing. I only pointed this out to show Jeff's obvious lack of journalistic experience

Then why didn't you say, "He lacks journalistic experience?" Then we could have talked about the fact that there's no minimum requirement for years spent in the business or number of credit hours passed. Instead, you hopped up and down on the "he's gay!" button, which is among the lowest things a person can do.

Also, prostitution gay or straight is illegal and, in my opinion, highly immoral.

I agree with you, 100%. However, we don't disqualify people from reporting the news because of what they do in their personal lives, even if what they choose to do is felonious.

Concerning Helen Thomas -- I guess thats what they call good journalist nowadays, abusive.

I think that kind of proves my point. Your contention is that the only people who should be allowed to report the news are those who are politically opposed to George W. Bush. You remind me of those liberal activists last week who called on Brit Hume to resign because he wasn't being enough of a liberal activist himself.

Guess what, friend? Everybody gets to report the news. Even those with whom you disagree. The attempt by a few anti-conservatives to discredit a journalist with whom they disagreed by digging up dirt on his past was shameful, and your full-throated endorsement of that attempt is just as shameful.

Of course I can understand how a former gay whore can be confused about that last point.

Tell me again how you're not slamming Gannon because he's a fag.

Is it me

[Anonymous Coward]

or does that site read like the ending to Metal Gear Solid 2?

Oh. My. God.

[samael]

The whole fuss over people on both sides of the debate "Blogging will change the universe!" and "Blogging is just pointless!" misses the point.

Blogging is _exactly_ what happened at the start of the internet craze - it's _home pages_. Blogs are just home pages that are easier to update than they used to be back in the olden days, so people don't have to worry about HTML in order to create them.

Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more, nothing less.

Blogs

[CastrTroy]

I have to say that blogs are a good way to generate traffic. I read about 4 blogs a day, most just from friends. However, most of my friends, like myself, have their own domain name, and pay some kind of hosting service. Geocities was one of the first free web page services. But nobody knew HTML and everybody's page looked really bad. It also took a lot of work to get what you wanted to say onto the web in a nice organized fashion. But still, Geocities was immensely popular, and is still around, although bought out by Yahoo. People want to express themselves on the web. And even if each blog only generates 5 hits a day, if you can get 5% of web users to have a blog, you're still going to generate a lot of hits, while only paying for bandwidth and servers.

Blog poem

[Anonymous Coward]

Read my post please sign my guestbook
I've got cheeto crumbs in every nook
I've added you to my friends list
Real desparate for attention, get my drift?
CowboyNeal's life in the blogosphere
Day after day, wonder if you're queer

History repeats

[HMarieY]

First, in reference to those who don't get blogging: It is finally a way for all of us would-be writers and journalists to express our humble opinions in a place where they might actually be read. It is a diverse community without the usualy limits and editing done when something is written within major media.

Historically speaking this has happened numerous times. Each time a new media appears it changes the way all previous media performs, killing that which is no longer viable, gradually reshaping "old media" and creating a new means of information. Think about how the printing press, television, and computers have all changed the way major media reacts with the masses. As the price of producing in that media lowers more people will begin to produce in that media, creating a more diverse body of knowledge than "popular opinion" that big media tends to stick with. For instance as the prices of printing came down during the industrial revolution many would-be activists printed pamphlets of their beliefs. I actually own a pamphlet printed from that time insisting that we should move to a 12 digit numeric system, not exactly something that would be put forth by main stream media at the time, especially with the push for metric. And so it is to be expected that blogging will recreate media, providing a check and balance system for main stream media, just as has happened in the past.

That said, part of the point is that the price must be low in order to be used. Bloggers that are read daily by large masses: Instapundit and Lileks for example can easily manage to pay for their bandwith costs and to use purchased blogger software, but the average blogger doesn't have a ton of readers and unless he gets discovered, more than likely eats hiis bandwith costs each month and will prefer the free model for blogging apps. So, as far as investments go, I am not sure that that particular model will prove productive.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[trufflemage]

Technically you're correct, but I believe there's a significant difference in user attitudes. A home page has the flavor of the-face-I-show-the-world, almost an online resume, and all the extra care that goes along with that: are my photos flattering? Do I highlight my strengths? It's self-advertizing.

Blogs seem somehow more candid. Maybe there's an appeal to exhibitionism, or maybe few users understand exactly what's happening, but for some reason it is very easy to rattle out the most personal thoughts on the keyboard. On a few notable recent occasions users who did not trouble to guard their anonymity have paid RL consequences for blogging a little too candidly (ie, at Google).

I think blogging as a cultural phenomon is well worth some scrutiny.

And some businesses are attacking...

[night_flyer]

I submitted this a couple of days ago, but it seems it wasn't important enough for its own story.

A local news paper, The Tulsa World, sent out a cease and desist letter saying to stop quoting their opinions/articles (in whole or in part) and to stop deep linking to their unprotected .pdfs to these websites:
Batesline.com, Chris Medlock's blog (a city councilor who is the subject of a recall), and TulsaNow.org because some messages in the forum include links to articles.

The Tulsa World's webmaster apparently didn't know how to stop unauthorized linking until just recently. Wednesday he said it couldn't be done, today it is fixed.

Two other websites are involved in this story of so called copyright infringement, freedom of speech and deep linking. Tulsans for election integrity also received the letter, they are against the recall. The coalition for responsible government are for the recall and has directly copied, in their entirety, articles from the Tulsa World and have received no such letter (the we know of) the Tulsa World has been informed, so either the coalition for responsible government is ignoring the demand or the Tulsa World has given them blanket permission to do such a thing.

This story has been covered locally and nationally

Re:Oh. My. God. - citizen journalism is here.

[davids-world.com]

You're looking at the blogging craze from a purely technical viewpoint. But the real news is not the technology (homepage plus CMS). The news lies in the fact that citizen journalism, sometimes paired with a bit of personal exhibitionism, has suddenly become reality. The blogosphere has good potential to change the way society deals with information exchange, reducing the power of media monopolies. It gives back control over information management to the readers, but leads to more scattered, biased and often error-prone reporting. The movement is very promising, yet poses a lot of problem that we all have to deal with, on a technical, sociological and economic level.

I hate the word "Blogging"

[DebianDog]

I would first off like to say that I hate the word "blogging". The first time I saw it I thought it was something "new and exciting". Just shook my head in disgust when I found out it was "glorified HTML".

I avoided the weblog thing not really seeing the value. One day I realized I have a bunch of information I would like to post but it really did not "deserve" a full webpage dedicated to it... Duh!

Hell it may not deserve a "blog" but here is The iMovie FAQ News If nothing else it looks "clean and neat".

Re:I hate the word "Blogging"

[Anonymous Coward]

it's == it is
its == possessive
its' == syntax error in line 3 of grammar.rb

Also, all those quote-marks are not necessary if you're quoting yourself.

Re:I hate the word "Blogging"

[DebianDog]

Damn "Web Gammer Nazi's"!

Re:I hate the word "Blogging"

[DebianDog]

I know... spealling tooo

OMG LOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting this story to my blog right away!!

Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more,

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes yes yes yes yes: http://www.blog-n-play.com/

Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more. But nothing less either. And they can be free, as here. Very cool. Anyone here tried creatng one yet?

Mod parent DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

Navel Gazing, Mac using bitch. Oho and I wouldn't leave him alone with the kiddies either ;)

On an unrelated note, can anyone tell me what the fuck a cameltoe is?

Re:Oh. My. God.

[jomagam]

Mod parent up. He understands what is the kind of blogging that really makes sense from a business perspective: everyday people uploading pictures of their trips, writing reviews of restaurants they discovered or discussing last week's Apprentice. Multiply is one company that's kinda like it where blogging is married with social networking. Just look at my homepage. If you're not registered, you only see stuff I posted for the whole world. People in my network see more; then there are photos that only my friends can see but not my family... You get the idea. This kind of approach makes business sense because it reaches so many people. You're a potential user as long as you have friends or family you care about.

Re:Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages, nothing more

[jg21]

Seems like a very easy to use interface. I love the idea of having these illustrious blog domains for free - what's the twist? Is there one?

[link fixed]Blogs: Just easy-to-use web pages,

[jg21]

Seems like a very easy to use interface. I love the idea of having these illustrious blog domains for free - what's the twist? Is there one?

Not a good thing

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Blogs are fine and dandy for private use, or for little people to have a voice, but yesterday evening (about 3amish) I was watching BBC world news (in the UK). So I'm watching this ABC broadcast I believe it was and they had some story about an Iraqi girl some army unit saving a little girl.. and the source quoted was "A blog". Now this is where I get problems, as soon as blogs become "well known media" we start to see them corrupting.

No long is it "An opinion and no media bullshit" it's just "media bullshit based on an opinion of some no one can prove is even real". All I can say is thank god the BBC arn't doing this... yet

Re:Not a good thing

[Jerf]

So I'm watching this ABC broadcast I believe it was and they had some story about an Iraqi girl some army unit saving a little girl.. and the source quoted was "A blog". Now this is where I get problems, as soon as blogs become "well known media" we start to see them corrupting.

I don't see blog corruption in your example, I see a Major News Organization who either didn't research the story enough to verify it, or convey the fact that they did that research well enough to convince you.

All stories start out as uncorraborated rumors, unless the media has people and cameras directly on the site of the story. But ultimately, whether or not a story starts out as video footage or something I mumbled in my sleep last night is utterly irrelevant... the question is, is it true?

By the way, if you honestly think you've been getting "no media bullshit", you're nuts, absolutely nuts, and grossly misinformed. I had no idea that there were still so many people who still thought the media was some sort of mystically holy and unbiased source of news until I read the comments for this article. I mean, isn't the history of the term "yellow journalism" part of the standard history course in school still? An entire war largely manufactured by journalists? This isn't news, people...

Re:Oh. My. God.

[pez]

Most blogging sites are exactly that samael, and you've hit the nail on the head.

Multiply.com is a bit different though; they've integrated blogging with social networking and basic communication (like e-mail), so the people in your life who might actually care to read your blog, get automatically notified. Between that and it's support for Photo Albums, it might have a leg up on basic blogging sites like blogger and LJ.

Check out my Multiply site or start your own.

Disclaimer: I work for Multiply.

Revenue

[Luthair]

I can't see much revenue for the blogging hosts, they still only really have banners/popups.

Heavily viewed blogs could be used to promote products, ie give the blogger a free product in exchange for a favourable mention.

Re:Revenue

[shark72]

"I can't see much revenue for the blogging hosts, they still only really have banners/popups."

That's an interesting observation. I just bought a Lotus Elise with blog host revenue. TFA points out that Six Apart has seven million users -- larger than Slashdot's userbase by an order of magnitude. If their take rate to paid accounts is like mine, they're grossing about $1.5 million a month, and their company has fewer than five employees.

Reading the comments to this article shows that many other Slashdotters similarly don't see the revenue potential for blog hosting. You're not alone, but nonetheless, a little research will probably open your eyes.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[samael]

Cheers for that. I'd be very tempted, but I already use Livejournal, which also have email notification, photo albums, security settings, etc. Your site looks pretty cool too though. Good luck with it.

blog? oh you mean online diary.

[Anonymous Coward]

gay gay gay stupid gay stupid stupid.. dotcom bubble all over again. nobody gives a shit about whats on your mind you self pretentious smug piece of shit.

Original Content

[Anonymous Coward]

#!

Well, blogs CAN have original content too; don't generalize.. ._

Am I the only non-(insert X) out there

[ediron2]

If you aren't a participant or former participant, the H in IMHO probably should be incremented to I, for Irrelevant:

I never have caught on to the (crafting, hockey, NASCAR, gay, neocons, rap, college, intarweb, wine, art, photography, religion, burning-man, PTA, michael jackson) thing. The only time I ever hear about X is when a friend mentions it, especially when they talk about all the hot chicks there.

X, IMHO, is overrated.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[Anonymous Coward]

So does that mean in five years blog sites will be stuffed to the gills with pages that haven't been updated since two presidential elections ago?

Re:Oh. My. God.

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that taking an idea that almost worked (home pages), and making it easy to use (blogs), can make a world of difference.

Note that Slashdot is a blog. If it wasn't so revolutionary, you wouldn't still have your user ID under 20,000.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[samael]

Oh goodness yes. Some of them already are. There are vast numbers of Livejournals that consist of "So, this is my new journal. Hello Everyone." and then nothing else.

Big Media Newspapsers with RSS feeds

[EvanKai]

My girlfriend and I updated a list of newspapers with RSS that Tom Biro of Media Drop started last year. There are now 85 daily newspapers with RSS feeds.

As an internet user that sucks

[tod_miller]

And I do not like weblogs inc, I think that thier veneer of terminology and technology hides nothing more than a two bit review whack site, and it is sad that such an opinion will be modded as a troll.

I hate blogs, always have, always will. Give me news, give me reviews, give me opinions, keep your blogs.

Weblogs inc is evil, sorry, not playing devil advocate or anything, I just do not like it.

In Korea, blogs are only for old people. future slashdot posting.

why evil

[tod_miller]

Well not that I have looked, but the feeling is all thier blog sites that they are getting people to splurg into are fairly spammyesque, they gripe me up in bad ways.

autoblog, engadget, pocketlintblog, ohmygodthinkofsomthingfunnyblog, somethingthatgwillhithighgooglerankblogs

each one posting and cross posting onto each other, and leaching favourable sounding verbiage linkage from sites such as well-meaning users of /.

They are poisoning google.

I wish google had a blacklist for its users.

Oh wait, I bet amazon have patented it.

(sorry, this isn't a troll, it is my damn solitary and quite lonely opinion of blogs, if you share my qualms over blogs, please do say so)

There's Revenue in Them Thar Blogs

[miller60]

The posters talking about a repeat of the .com bubble are simply not paying attention. The business press and venture capitalists are interested because working business models are finally emerging for a small number of worthwhile blogs. Sony is paying $25,000 a month to sponsor Lifehacker, the latest Gawker blog. Meanwhile, Google is touting Weblogs Inc. as the poster child for AdSense revenue at a presentation for stock analysts. This is real revenue. Yes, many blogs are flooding the Internet with crapola. But some of the better blogs are providing useful news and information and building niche audiences that advertisers will pay to reach.

Re:There's Revenue in Them Thar Blogs

[pz]

While there is obviously revenue to be had in reimplementing standard distribution models under the rubric of blogging, as is mentioned in the parent post, but there's plenty of fertile ground in the lower end of the scale, where individuals get to enjoy material produced by their associates, relatives, and friends. I'm thinking in particular about social communication sites like Multiply.com which effectively integrate RSS-style mechanisms (new stuff appears at the top of a message list) with blogging.

another step forward

[goon]

I'll second that. Read about Rich Text Editing and Spell Check Come to TypePad and thats pretty much what the dog was designed for when I was working for sausage back in '95.

The key difference is that with a server based model you have a simplified platform (browser) compared to targeting an operating system (MS Windows) with a binary.

Re:another step forward

[samael]

Yup. Although you have to manage different browsers , of course.

And mostly I post to my Livejournal using the Semagic client, which does lots of useful stuff for me (like shortcut keys for hyperlinks).

Re:another step forward

[goon]

Semagic client, which does lots of useful stuff for me

yeah I spotted this just today (and appreciated the significance). For example ecto (commercial blog client) which acts as a binary client supporting multiple blog api's. Thus theres a sort of binary revenge here because the web based systems have their minuses (until I tried out gmail) .

I must say though users are voting with their dollars - enough even to move binary boys such as Joel and Miguel rethink.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[corblix]

Blogging is _exactly_ what happened at the start of the internet craze - it's _home pages_.

Excellent point. Just what I've been mumbling to myself for a while; I'm glad someone came out and said it.

To amplify: Personal web pages, a.k.a. "Blogs", are revolutionary. They are changing the world, and I imagine they will continue to do so. They started doing so around 1990. The techies got involved in big numbers around 1993. The man on the street started noticing around 1997. A while later someone came up with some nice interface ideas and coined the word "Blog". Good for them, but that was just another step in a revolution that had begun a decade earlier.

Now some pundits wake up and say, "Hey! The internet isn't only about huge companies!" Well, it never was, and I'm glad they finally figured that out.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[mdwh2]

Although this is one of many advantages that things like LiveJournal have over traditional homepages. If I'm reading via my "friends page" (or RSS, or whatever else), then I only see new entries as they appear. People who haven't updated in years don't bother me.

Compare this to the problem with homepages where you'd have to manually check to see if there was any new content.

Of course, this assumes that you're taking advantage of new features offered by blogs (friends pages, RSS or whatever). If you're just browsing them manually like you would a normal homepage, then it should be obvious you get the same disadvantages that occur with homepages.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[mdwh2]

Well, I know that if I stuck "Anyone fancy coming down the pub?" on my homepage, then even if I had implemented a fancy comments system, and even though my friends know of my homepage, I wouldn't receive any replies (except perhaps weeks or months later when someone happens to look). Also I'd have no way of making it so that only some people can see.

Yet, organising such social activities works on LiveJournal.

Whilst what you say might apply to standalone blogs (although it's not just the ease of updating, but also things like a comments system), things like LiveJournal add a lot more of a social element, via things like friends lists, security settings and communities (as you should presumably be aware). For me at least, LiveJournal has almost entirely replaced email as a means of online communication with my friends, and it also seems to have been responsible for killing off several mailing lists I'm on, so whilst I won't argue whether it's the next big thing, it has to be something more than simply having a homepage.

Re:Oh. My. God.

[samael]

I (H) Livejournal. And it fourishes because it allows you to read your friend's posts easily, like RSS, only local. It's a lovely, lovely system, and the only 'social software done right' site I've seen.