Wall Street Journal’s Happy Blogiversary article commemorates 10 years of blogging with brief blips of info from some a-list bloggers, and an interview with the creators of Blogger, among others. There’s an interesting slideshow of blog history, and the whole feature adds to the current ongoing chronicle of the mainstreaming of blogging.
The interview with the Blogger folks focused on the majority of their bloggers as individuals with only a few readers for their blogs, people wanting to post family photos and connect with only a few others. This is the general picture of the blogger, and one which has a definite place in the world of electronic communications, but it is only a small part of the picture. As Dave Watson pointed out in his recent Dot Comment article in the Georgia Straight, there is a wealth of useful niche-information out there, powered by passionate (dare I say obsessive?) people who blog directly and completely on their topics of interest.
The WSJ interviews also included a variety of known bloggers, each with their particular bent, all indicating the wider range that blogging now encompasses. Ultimately, blogging is here to stay, and is another aspect of the communication cornucopia (or is that dystopia?) in which we now function.
A friend sent me the WSJ link over the weekend, and I hesitated to link it to this posting as these things are often not available for long. Already the video component of the site has come down – but here’s a link to the text – try it and see if it still works.
(Aside: My friend had sent over this link because of my McLuhan interest. In the article, Tom Wolfe, blog curmudgeon, said: “One by one, Marshall McLuhan’s wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective “news” reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.
And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way.”
Fair enough, but is this really a problem? Redefine “objective” as we redefine “news”.)
technorati tags: wall+street+journal, marshall+mcluhan, media, blogosphere, journalism, objectivity, news
it’s uncanny how these predictions come true – and not. web 2.0 certainly has a “rumour” aspect to it and can be very clique-y (is that what was meant by “tribal”?) – you only have to watch digg for a day to confirm that.
but who’s to say that non-journalists can NOT deliver objective content? and, as you say, what exactly is meant by “objective”? often, that word simply translates into “party line.”