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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.'"
If all the the WSJ has to write about it a virtual-print article about a virtual-print logging service
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
...totally boring, usually incorrect, massively ignored, whiners...then yes.
No. Next?
-Valiss
The "world" (I use that word loosely) is realizing that it's not only the automatically appointed elitists who's opinion or viewpoint is important. It's coming down to the intelligent individual, who can give a less biased (or sometimes not) and always informative opinion and update on important subject matter to everyday persons. I'd much rather read blogs than find out who Jennifer Aniston is dating now in the latest People.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
I read a lot of blogs, but I'm ashamed to admit it in public. The perception is that all blogs are just like LiveJournal/MySpace self-absorbed bitchfests.
"Blogosphere" sounds even worse. I will never utter that word as long as I live.
Add commenting capability to a website, update it regularly and SUDDENLY, OH NOEZ ITS A BLAWG!!!!!.
Bloggers are hot shit the same way desktop linux is hot shit. Everybody doing it thinks it's the coolest damned thing since the toaster. Nobody else gives a shit.
(disclaimer : I blog.)
The reason bloggers are courted is because they can put a personal touch with communication with their followers. Thus if they plug a product, then advertisers will get more bang for their buck, even with smaller reading audiences.
My mostly unread blog [only about a dozen regular readers who aren't family or close friends] still has people finding it, and using the information on it. Unlike a newspaper, they aren't as shy about asking me a question about my content, and I'm more likely to give a personalized response to a request for additional info.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
aren't part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world's new elite.
No - no, they are not. Mayhap the person(s) forming this opinion should venture into the "tech world" one of these days.
bloggers:tech_world_elite::script_kiddies:securit
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
The difference is anyone can open a Blog, with little or no skill and a web connection. While you can get a column in the WSJ with little or no skill, you need a whole lot more than a net connection.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
It seems to me that a lot of these things are simply a factor of how much someone's material is getting read. Traditionally, the mainstream media is given special treatment because they have a wide audience. If there are bloggers with a wide audience, then it only makes sense that they would get the same treatment, and it's no secret that the audience for blogs is large and probably growing. It doesn't seem to me that it's a question of ideology or even what format writes in. As the summary says, it's an "influence peddling universe", and people are going to go after whoever controls that influence, whether blogger or reporter.
Bloggers are not necessarily the world's tech elite, but they are certainly the loudest, the most outspoken and, yes, most of them are the early adopters.
The same (early adopters bit in particular) can be said about social bookmarking users. For instance, less than 1/3 of all Simpy users use IE, and over 40% of them use Firefox. If we assume that early tech adopters are also Firefox and not IE users, then yes, bloggers and social bookmarker are early adopters. But does that make them the elite? Does Linus Torvalds have a blog? Not. Yet.
Simpy
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I recently finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media called: " Mass Media, By And For The Masses. It makes the case that the london transit bombings represent the birth of emergent mass media and will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
From TFA:
I think the message is clear. Blogs may not offer quantity of suckers^H^H^H viewers, but they do offer quality of viewers. With one link in the right blog, the marketing man can pay to reach the exact people he could only hope of catching by chance in other media. This isn't just a marketing pipe dream. Bribing bloggers is about to become big business.
One could hope that the blogging community will be steadfast enough to resist the oncoming corruption, but it's hard to be steadfast after some oily marketing representative has just stuffed your face in a nice restaurant and shacked you up with a four star hotel room.
Be prepared. A lot of blogs, not all, but a lot, are about to pull a great big "Driver 3: 9/10" on various items. I'd guess the form this will take will be hyping new technologies, languages and frameworks, rather than blatantly plugging products. Think the hyping of Java, only for whatever new tech rolls around next time.
If the marketers are really good, and they are, the bloggers may not even know they've been bought.
May the Maths Be with you!
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.
Anyone who hasn't noticed this already either is already in the elite, or is content being a fanboy:
The digerati are cheering the blogosphere, hailing it as the falling of the final barrier to the open public medium that the Internet was supposed to be -- in much the same way that the creation of the Wiki is seen as the long-awaited achievement of the knowledge-network that the hypertexted Web was supposed to be.
But of course the digerati are cheering the blogosphere -- it's their personal domain.
As the theory goes, the blogosphere makes it so anyone at all can put their interests, views, and discoveries on their blog, some portion of the Internet masses (especially blog-readers) will see it, share it, spread it around. Each person can be their own broadcast tower, theoretically equal in visibility and reach potential to anyone else.
Except it's not quite like that (bandwidth and space limitations being only part of the antithesis). There is a subtle, unspoken but implicit "popular Darwinism" that occurs in this process. As it is the digerati that does much of the reading and spreading, it is the digerati that ends up doing the saying of what gets read and spread.
Certainly a few well-placed blogs have launched otherwise typical netizens into the ranks of the digerati -- Rob Malda, Philip Kaplan, Drew Curtis to name a few off the top of my head. And to some extent, they deserve some sort of recognition of being the first to come up with certain online concepts.
As a result, though, they also each help hold the keys to the gate of the blogosphere. And despite being independent, free-willed individuals, capable of making their own value judgements, a barrier to entry into the slipstream of the blogosphere manages to form among them. Despite being controlled in only limited amounts by individual people, only certain elements make it through this cultural elite.
Of course, not all of the "blogerati" are on the mountain because of their blogging pluck; some are there because they have always been there, in the digerati circles, which is doubly reflexive: being in the digerati means, by definition, that they will try to be on top of any new "hip" Net development; and by being digerati, they will get an boosted amount of attention when they do so.
It would be wonderful if the blogosphere was truly an open community. The thought that there really could be an open exchange of information (casual or otherwise) that people could contribute to, and that information be assessed and categorized, and be available to those who were looking for it or had an interest in it, is one that brings forth feelings of true community, egalitarianism, and diversity. Instead, it is a sort of random quasi-natural selection, where some are in, and some are out, and there is no real reason to it.
You had a better chance to get read in 1997 by posting to Usenet than you do in 2005 posting to Slashdot.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
are other bloggers.
There seems to be a lot of flack towards the author by the slashdot (holds his breath waiting for the collective gasp of surprise)community. In particular seems to be a lot of revulsion towards his use of the word 'elite'. What some have touched on, but people seem to overlook, is the fact that in a sense these people are very much the 'elite' of the information providing world.
Nearly the entire world has a collective distaste for the majority of the established media. However, A-list bloggers, as he describes them, provide an alternative and often informed opinion about specific subject matter. Do I care what ABC news says about the war in Iraq? Not at all. But that blog from a squad commander on the front line in Uzbekistan(sic) about the day to day life of the soldiers under his command and his struggles with his superior officers is damn sure getting a bookmark in my favorites. Maybe I don't care what CNN thinks is the next new gadget to buy. But I DO care what an MIT professor blogs about as exciting projects among his graduate class.
The ultimate difference is that blogging is journalism by the people, for the people. Much like the real media, it is saturated with non-accurate information, but it also has the occasional trade expert who can provide us an internal view on how things actually work, and THAT is elite. Hate the slang, hate the excess, but remember that those kids writing about their D&D games online now will be talking about their business start-up plans in 10 years. There is a lot of room to grow, a lot of room to tangentize, but simply put it is more than a fad. More than a trend. It is a way for people to connect with other people who actually care about something.
PS - I'm not perfect, my opinions are my own, but I share them with the community. Do with it what you will. I did.
Sure, but wait until I have Linux running on my toaster! Maybe I should blog about it...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Companies place at the front of the line whoever talks about their product or service in the most flattering ways. "Web loggers" are well known for floofy, heavily biased stuff- and they don't have all that training in nasty things like ethics that get in the way of corporate agendas. Further, I'd guess the percentage that report to an editor to be in the realm of less than 1%, and I'd guess that 90% of that 1% are "mainstream" journalists working for "mainstream" media.
I find it absolutely no surprise they're placed in front of journalists.
And no, "web loggers" are NOT journalists. Journalists CAN have a "web log"- there's a very important distinction there. "Web loggers" love to complain about "traditional" or "mainstream" media and often compare themselves to "mainstream" media figures nobody takes seriously, in an attempt to legitimatize themselves. The extent to which they willfully discredit a profession is absolutely atrocious. When was the last time you hear someone complain about "mainstream" mechanical engineers, for example? There is a reason we educate people in professional fields and place stock in those educations. They're not infallable, but far as I can tell- they're a lot more reliable and trustworthy than the "web logging" community as a whole. For example, I've found numerous instances of "web log" entries linked to by slashdot which have had circumstantial ties to the subject of the entry- usually some company's product. Another linked posting was by a guy who was closely tied to an "online marketing expert." I think there is quite a bit of astroturf in the "web log" arena- much more so than in "mainstream" media, I'd bet.
IMHO, journalists are people who go to school and study it, train under the wing of a mentor, and report to an editor. Bloggers are "some Joe with a webpage."
Please help metamoderate.
I have a blog. It's mostly full of random thoughts, notes to people and reviews of things I like. It's read by 20 or so of my friends and that's about it. Does that some how make me an elite person or does it just mean I'm using a blog to get thoughts of my head and run them through?
Anyone who thinks blogs are a resource worth listening to and appealing to beyond any other basic news site clearly doesn't understand blogs. They're not some sort of revolution in ways of reporting news, they're not the newest way to make money. They're simpaly social circles written down, in the past I'd tell friends about new games I was playing, now I just blog about them and they can read it if they wish.
The way most blog systems are set up is very simple and easy. You click a button after you've done typing and it's done. It's like having a geocities site with no limit on bandwidth and no need to waste time designing a layout. Maybe a few more links and a few less images but this isn't anything special, just another resource for the average person to use.
I like muppets.
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.
Really? I'd think it's much cheaper to buy off 1,000 small-time bloggers than to buy off a news organization. The freebies that companies send out impress Some Blog Dude way more than a jaded tech journalist for a mainstream newspaper.
Plus, if your blog is exposed as a shill for tech companies, just shut it down and open two others! You can live off the corporate freebies and AdSense revenue forever, and you can even purport to count yourself among the "world's new elite."
For more information, click here.
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.
I don't know... I tried to cite a handful of reputable and well known bloggers (I won't mention any names) in an essay that I wrote last year for a science class at uni. However, my first draft was handed to me with red lines through each reference to a blogger in my bibliography, along with a comment to include "real sources".
Do people generally feel that bloggers are not reliable sources or was that a personal bias from my professor?
There's nothing elite about bloggers. They're just minor celebrities, like the guy that invented Cheetos.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
And yet... these people that nobody else "gives a shit" about are apparently getting front-row treatment. Interesting way to be ignored.
Not that your pithy comment doesn't have some merrit - there's a lot of hubris around blogs that need some reality checks. But let's at least try to do it reasonably. Obviously SOMEONE other than "bloggers" care. But one point is that posting up a blog doesn't buy you in to this newfound interest any more than getting an article published by your local community newspaper and calling yourself a "reporter" gets you national press credentials.
Did you accidently space in the wrong place?
It looks like you typed "the masses"; are you sure you didn't mean to put the space *after* the 'm' instead of before it?
-- Terry
I was amused to read this study made in Germany which shows that more people keep blogs than read them!
I hope you do better then I did, I used a cd-writer and an industrial laser, but it didn't work out well:* Runs to toaster, inserts bread slices, runs back to desktop *Ok, I can burn custom tux images on my bread, but next time I wouldn't use a single speed writer anymore.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey