It seems like every weblog out there was talking about James Cowan’s article about weblogs for the National Post, ‘Bloggers’ emerge from internet underground. Seth Dillingham observed that the writer seemed to miss the point,
If you want to “understand” weblogs, you first need to ask yourself who or what you’re interested in. There are weblogs on nearly every topic imaginable. This is independent publishing: people write about what they know and live.
Yes. I do not even think the whole weblog format is all that important except that everyone seems to “get it” when they see a weblog (well, one of my relatives said he found the format incomprehensible and difficult to follow, so maybe not everyone) — and many people immediately want to start one of their own.
Seth notes that Cowan focuses on a comment by Dave Winer to the effect that a newspaper like the Los Angeles Times might write only a 600-word review of a computer product that “will probably skip the details.” What Winer and the writer both fail to note is that the 2,000 word review in a computer magazine might also leave out important details. Not because they are not aware of them, but because they are writing for large audiences and what qualifies as important does not have any objective meaning.
Consider something like MP3 players. Even some computer magazines will forget to mention that an MP3 player contains some sort of digital rights management scheme, much less provide detail on how sophisticated the DRM scheme is. A lot of the initial coverage of Apple’s iPod, for example, was short on details about the iPod’s copy protection scheme (the iPod has a DRM system, but it is trivial to get around).
Information tends to be extremely localized — there are a lot of people out there who will never show up being interviewed by professional journalists who nonetheless have a lot of information and knowledge to share. A weblog reduces the cost of sharing that information to the point that the primary constraint seems to be time rather than money (a couple years ago, I saw lots of hobby sites closing down for lack of money. Today, I typically see them shutting down due to lack of time and/or interest — which is also a variant on the lack of money, though, since if they were able to generate a lot of money off of their site, they probably would have more interest and time to devote to maintaining it).
There is something else going on here, though. I think weblogs are beginning to form a largely volunteer market for information and ideas. The currency in this market are links back to the sites that contribute to this market.
This occurred to me while reading Instapundit the other day. Glenn Reynolds had posted about an item. A couple hours later he posted a message saying that the person who claimed to be the first to alert him to this particular item was not happy that he had not been linked to on Reynolds’ page (and Reynolds then gave him credit and linked to his page).
Why was this person so disappointed? Because a link from Reynolds’ page means a temporary spike in traffic. I see this with some of my sites, where I receive lots of requests to link to specific sites from my own site because even though I might not have Reynolds’ readership, on some specific topics like animal rights, I can drive some decent traffic to other sites by linking to them.
So what happens here is an incentive system has emerged to share information in order to obtain links. This is a very positive trend. Early on when weblogs were all the craze, the big criticism was that this was an incestuous lot who linked back and forth amongst each other saying nothing, but the events of Sept. 11 really solidified this series of weblogs that is linked in a way that is eerily like an unorganized press agency.
Now the immediate retort is that very little of what goes on in weblogs is primary reporting. I write a lot about animal rights protests, for example, but have not been to one in over a decade. Duncan Smeed writes of the National Post article that,
He seemed to be saying that if it weren’t for ‘proper’ journalists webloggers wouldn’t have anything to write about and that all we’d be is a sad bunch of people talking about nothing. I guess we’re taking about professional journalists at the moment 😉
I think there is definitely such an attitude in some of the anti-blog pieces, but that makes about as much sense as saying, for example, that if Israel and the Arab nations were not always at each others throats, that Middle Eastern correspondents would have nothing to write about.
Weblogs are not replacing traditional reporting, but they are replacing traditional commentary and analysis. The real losers in the whole weblog phenomenon are the op-ed writers and other analysts. I do not turn to weblogs to tell me what the news is, as much as what the news means. This applies to everything from what the latest events in the Middle East mean to the ins and outs of some new piece of technology.