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Forbes Goes After Bloggers
walterbyrd writes "In a recent article, Forbes bashes bloggers big time (forbesdontbug/forbesdontbug)." From the article: "Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims--even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat. " BoingBoing has a long post about the article.
god, don't you hate it when the lowly plebs have a forum in which to have their voice heard? I just feel so much sympathy for giant corporations with access to the biggest media outlets in the world. It's just awful that they are being picked on by individuals who more often than not live paycheck to paycheck and have to face the practical consequences of the decisions these companies make in private board rooms.
Also, boycott Nestle.
I've only skimmed the article, but has it occured to you guys that it might not be all wrong. We're quick to rush in and defend blogs - they're a great way for the underdogs to expose actual wrongdoing and injustices - but maybe not all bloggers deserve our support.
The truth is, Forbes is right, blogs allow yahoos with an axe to grind and phony information to gain publicity adn credibility - after all, they're the underdog, standing against the faceless corporation. In a day where pretty much all of us are very skeptical of anything published in the mainstream maybe far too many of us are willing to take anything read in a blog as the gospel truth (I read it on the Internet, so it has to be true).
FUD flows in both directions, and businesses should be at least aware of the blogosphere, and that bloggers may be spreading misinformation, and how to counter it with the truth. Businesses, of course, also need to know that the blogosphere is watching their every move - and they need to be more careful now than ever that they always act ethically - something thye should be doing anyway.
Reading the Frobes article deeper, it's pretty hard to defend. The article itself is full of misinformation and despicable ideas (in their sidebars, they side with SCO, malign Pamela Jones, and suggest using the DMCA to take down blogs). Nevertheless, the general idea of my post still remains - maybe we're a bit too trusting of blogs, and it doesn't hurt to look at the other's guys point of view. Bloggers are just as capable of spreading FUD as a corporation - even more capable because wheras a corporation has very very little accountability, an anonymous blogger has even less.
Stupid like a fox!
Face it, if people can get good information directly from various websites, what do we need so-called professional journalists for? This is a threat to magazines like Forbes and the author of this reference article. And my guess is they realize this implicitly, and they don't have a solution other than the same solution Microsoft has tried to use against open source: fear, uncertainty and doubt. Or smear campaigns, which are essentially the same thing.
Certainly the potential for abuse is possible in what people say. But that is the price we pay for free speech and free press. The only other alternative is government regulation such as licensing of journalists which, of course, publications like Forbes could handle while private parties could not.
The presumption of this article is that people's weblogs cannot ever have anything of value. Also, like many others he chooses to pick on Groklaw and it's so-called pro-IBM and anti-SCO bias without regard to whether the comments on Groklaw are reasonable, accurate or true. The vitriolic tone of what the author wrote seems to indicate he has not read the material there, just taken the opinions of what people who don't like what is posted.
This seems to be the whole point of his article, his opinion is that people being able to directly expose their opinions to others without the filtering of some media organization is automatically bad. Which it is.
For the media organizations.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.