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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.'"
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.)
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.
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.