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Bloggers the Tech World's New Elite?
Carl Bialik writes "Wall Street Journal tech columnist Lee Gomes says that the top tech blogs 'aren't part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world's new elite. Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it's not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.'"
They're just being fadded to death by people who don't understand the technology OMG BLOGOSPHERE OMGOMG!
What it comes down to is reliable respected information sources. Some blogs are excellent, but most are crap...this is to be expected with the low barrier to entry.
Print tech reporters have had it too easy for too long...you had to be print first, which means that the tech reporter for the WSJ or the NYT has to have been in the business for quite a while, and is probably not exactly tech savvy, and certainly not hip. Now those fossils are competing with bloggers, and some of those bloggers are hip, articulate, AND extremely tech savvy, so, of course, they're getting beat down.
What's their conclusion? Is it, we need to hire people like that to do our tech column? No. It's OMG OMG BLOGS RULE BLOGOSPHERE OMG! Blah blah blah. Eventually they'll stop missing the point.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Get off your high horse. It's people like you, who write on the Internet and think they're special for it, that are pushing the whole blog thing. Everyone's excited and writing about it, but also linking to their blog at the end of everything they write online now. So what, you wrote some stuff... It's probably just as homogenous as everything else that's written in any other form.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
I'm not sure I'd go that far, as some of the bloggers in Techland do seem to have a grasp of the fundamentals. Whether I would call them members of the "elite" is debateable. If news organizations are losing out to bloggers, what does that say about the newspeople? And if these bloggers are the "elite", doesn't that mean they'll eventually fall prey to courting by big interests (Microsoft, Oracle, etc.)?
Everyone has an opinion. Anyone can start a blog. Chaos ensues.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
When "Elite" and "Blogger" are used in the same sentence, you know we are in more trouble than any of us want to believe.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Much harder to bribe 1000 different bloggers, than to bribe a single news organization. Bullshit. Bloggers have far less to lose, not having spent the last 100 years building a reputation. Most can probably bought for a few trinkets. Microsoft is already paying bloggers for favorable press. Basically, bloggers can be bought for pennies compared to the price of traditional media. With traditional media, you've got to buy millions in advertising space to get them to lie about how good your product is...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.