This
question is being asked by the mass media
as they try to determine what role blogging and community websites will have on their industry and their livelihoods. I think they are missing the point. The low barriers of entry to online publishing have meant that every niche imaginable
is being filled. Are bloggers journalists? Some are, many aren't. The internet is a diverse media with almost infinite variation in content. Asking a question like are bloggers journalists is stupid. So what is blogging at the moment?
UseNet Through To Slashdot
UseNet was an email based service where people posted to newsgroups. Initially it was difficult to follow a thread as email came in adhoc. Another difficulty of newsgroups was that there was no way to rate or moderate the mail coming through. Consequently UseNet was full of
flames
and
trollfests
. Many newsgroups came under the control of a single moderator who vetted all mail, but this solution doesn't scale.
With UseNet not scaling and people demanding some kind of filter for their content, sites like
Slashdot
began to appear on the internet. To fulfil the need for filtering of good content from bad, the software allowed the users - or community itself - to do the moderation of comments. This has been quite successful. Slashdot runs its primary stories through editors however, and while anyone with an account can post, only a few can post stories to the site. Slashdot has
its own issues as well
: like any popular site it has scaling issues.
The
Kuro5hin
website took this further, and opened up the front page stories to the community as well. Kuro5hin supplied the moderation components of Slashdot, but added community access to publishing to the front page and sections. It has proved popular, but like UseNet became infested with
crapflooders
, flamers and trolls. This was not necessarily a failure of the software, nor the ideas behind it, but of the editors that managed the environment. Incidentally South Sea Republic is based on the
same codebase
as Kuro5hin.
Blogging
Neither UseNet, nor the community publishing sites like Slashdot, kuro5hin,
metafilter
,
fark
etc, provided another niche that people wanted - a small place on the balkanized internet they could call their own. People had been setting up their own websites, posting articles and pictures of their dog but often as static pages. Australia is one of the few countries that actually supplies a unique top level domain (TLD) for this very purpose.
The .id.au domain
.
Blogging services such as blogger, blogspot and others - along with software such as wordpress, movable type and others - all contributed to making it easy and quick to publish a small article as often as the user liked. No knowledge of HTML, FTP, SSH, SCP or other arcane geek technologies was needed. Consequently blogging exploded onto the internet.
Blogging hasn't learnt from the lessons of UseNet, Slashdot and Kuro5hin. There is no moderation of the comments. Where there is, such as on
Tim Blair's
blog, it often draconian deletion of comments when they contradict the group think. The same lack of moderation means that crapflooding from spammers also often appears and filters are needed to keep this out. These same filters also capture signal, as well as noise, placing the moderation responsibility on the blogger themselves. As UseNet found this does not scale.
For the sites that do use moderation in their comments, such as the American Democrat partisan website
dailykos
, it is abused in order to earn "mojo".
Tip jar comments
being a good example of this misuse of moderation.
Blogging software also suffers from a lack of threading. It almost impossible to follow the flow of a thread of conversation from one use to another as other posts are in between. To be fair, many community websites, such as metafilter,
monkeyfilter
and fark also suffer from this oversight.
The fact remains that the internet is big enough for everyone. Mass media, UseNet, community websites and blogging websites. An infinitely scalable decentralised data network means there is room for every niche, and every need to be satiated. Consequently it is inevitable that some bloggers will publish information of sufficient quality that it is superior to mass media journalism.
Linky Winky
One of the benefits of the infinite possibilities of the internet is that it will fill every hole that needs to be filled. Mass Media is a static medium. It puts forward an opinion or information and gives no means for the reader, consumer or disseminator of that information to supply feedback. There is the letters to the editor section in all newspapers, or phone in sections in TV shows, but of a circulation of a million, publishing ten letters a day does not constitute feedback.
When the market doesn't supply a need, someone else will supply it. Many of the political bloggers are in reality the comments section of a newspaper or mass media website. If the mass media had comments fields under their articles, they would look like blogs. Many of the political bloggers have supplied a functionality that mass media has denied them. They are providing a decentralised feedback network.
It is often a criticism of political blogs that their cross linking of each others and mass media articles pollutes search engine results. But if you look at the blogs as one big comments thread to a primary article, the search engine is providing the same sort of aggregation of comments that a site like Slashdot does when it publishes an article and the comments below it in a self-contained page.
Mass media should not get concerned about blogging. We are actually revitalising their media - extending it, and adding value where mass media was not interested in adding value. It may mean that the blogosphere may provide primary articles that the mass media will later pick up and publish, but even so, the bloggers are often merely providing functionality and adding value where the mass media was oblivious.
Primary Source As The Point Of Greatest Scarcity
Under this inter-related viewpoint of decentralised opinion, it is the primary source that becomes the point of greatest scarcity, and hence, maximum value. At the moment the Mass Media is providing the majority of this primary source material simply because of its existing structure. It is funding professionals who collect news and information.
This is changing as many simply publish directly online. It also need not be Mass Media, but simply any point of primary source material. The
Australian Strategic Policy Institute
is another source of primary material of interest to myself and this website. But they are adding barriers to their information and their viewpoint being spread. They publish in PDF which is an internet unfriendly form. They also charge for their PDFs. This kills the blogosphere spreading of their ideas.
Before they charged for them, I covered their
Our Failing Neighbour
,
Sinews of War
,
Pay Your Money And Take Your Pick
, plus others. I recently requested that South Sea Republic be treated as a news organization by the ASPI and not be required to pay for the PDFs. ASPI is a government funded thinktank, and a reply from the ASPI alluded that the government "obliges" them to charge.
The Government's requirement of ASPI is that we are obliged to charge for our publications. We regret that we cannot agree to your request.I hope they will change their mind. It is in their interest to do so. South Sea Republic is one of the very few Australian blogs that covers military issues in any depth. The ASPI is thinking in terms of an ivory tower of specialists. They are also limiting themselves to the dead tree market of ideas. This is a very 1950s view of the world. I am hoping they embrace the information age by publishing their reports in HTML form, allowing their reports to be deep linked and asking for donations on their reports rather than creating false scarcity by charging for them. A simple rule of getting your ideas spread is - don't make it hard for the internet to deep link to your articles. We are the market for the propagation of your ideas - don't make it hard for your customers. That includes South Sea Republic. Conclusion In the wonderful world of information abundance and publishing niche, it is inevitable that some bloggers will rival and surpass the quality of journalism that mass media can put out. Given the fall into squalid partisanship of many of the old staple mass media outlets - I think the bloggers will ultimately eclipse mass media entirely - as good journalists publish directly to the internet rather than through a mass media outlet. Blogs have arisen because of the limitations and unwillingness of mass media to explore new ways of adding value to their content. In an abundance world, every niche is filled. Where the dinosaurs fear to tread, or are too dumb to recognize an opportunity, the people will fill that need with vigour and passion. We are better off for it. Mass media is unfortunately acting like the copyright cartels, attacking a medium which threatens its existence and which it doesn't understand. The thing about "Horse and Buggy" makers is that their irrelevancy is guaranteed. Embrace the abundance era - it is all good. cam
Comments