Slashdot Mirror
The Rise and Fall of Blogs
i-Love-to-blog writes "Blogs have revolutionized information delivery. They not only made the world much more smaller, but a lot more personal, united and un-afraid as well. Events like the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion made news channels take a back seat. Wired claimed blogs to be what Napster was to music. They even have a wager on Weblogs outranking the New York Times Web site by 2007. People got paid to blog. Then they got fired for that. Some lost money for blogging their ideas. Most just hand out links these days. When was the last time your favorite blogger talked sense? Have blogs reached a saturation point? Blogging burnout is a humorous look at the rise and fall of weblogs."
The bet is part of the Long Bets project, which is run by the Long Now foundation. The permanent URL for the bet is http://www.longbets.org/2.
Slashdot is not a weblog. It is a forum. It is not some "Real World" WebTV, aka, weblogs, where you just sit and consume some emo's angst and marvel at his or her lack of taste in music.
It is a community where a large number of people have discussions (and flame each other) about various news topics.
A weblog is one-way 'entertainment'.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Calling Slashdot a "blog" is like calling Candid Camera "reality television" or FM radio "streaming audio." A neologism loses some of its punch when you start retroactively applying it to pre-existing examples.
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Blogs are a terrible source of news, IMO. They are a better source of opinion, maybe, and for bantering about things like the latest gadgets, but anyone who's either sitting at home typing up a bunch of crap or worse, simply posting a bunch of links to some other "real" news site, is not doing anybody much good at all. And even for opinion, they really mainly exist for those who want to have their egos stroked by finding others whose opinions simply help confirm their own...
Well, then there's Christopher Allbritton, a freelance journalist who happens to run a blog.
back-to-iraq
I really don't consider his "postings" to be merely ego stroking or blathering about nothings, and for myself it's certainly been a source of insight into the goings on over there; at least, it provides some perspective to weigh against the slug fest broadcast over the traditional news media wires. The reader feedback (comments) is even, at times, compelling.
While it's true that in blogs there are more journals than journalists, I also think it quite snooty to believe that blogs are trivial just because they're blogs.