November 28, 2005
gapingvoid in the guardian
I was mentioned in an article today in the Media Guardian [registration required]. And they had my photo in the paper version.
There is a huge schism between the world of blogging, which has evolved a language and community all of its own, and the rest of the world, which thinks that blogs are mostly trivial forms of communication, largely devoted to pictures of the writer’s cat and read only by said writer’s friends and family.
But the refuseniks are being won over. The number of blogs — loosely defined as cheap, easily-created websites containing information posted in chronological order — is rising exponentially. A recent survey by web-tracking firm Technorati found that the number of blogs in existence doubles every five months.
Blog evangelists such as Hugh MacLeod, cartoonist, former ad creative and blogger via Gapingvoid.com, say that blogging has traditional media running scared. And certainly this opinion is borne out by recently departed Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers, who at the beginning of November branded newspapers as the 21st century equivalent of the vinyl record shop and the internet in all its guises as the way forward.
If you’re anywehere near a British newsagents, check it out.
[Bonus Link:] From B.L. Ochman: “Don’t they have fact checkers at the New York Times anymore?”
While I’m delighted to see that mainstream media is covering blogging, they still have a “gee whiz” attitude about blogging as a source of income or a marketing tool. And, because they seem not to be knowledgeable about the role of blogs in corporate marketing or the role of advertising in blogs, they make factual mistakes in their articles.
But is there just one “world of blogging?”
It looks to me like there are numerous fairly distinct “ecosystems” you could point to, each in its own way a “world of blogging.” (Or in its own self-understanding.)
Man, there’s a PhD thesis in here somewhere!
Afterthought: when I finally got around to starting a real blog, I told my mother (in her 60’s, retired, living deep in the country). Her response: “I wondered when you’d get around to blogging.”
The last article I read on Blogging was a seven-page fearfest painting us as a cross between internet-based corporate terrorists and libel-obsessed sociopathic hacker-types.
*sigh*
Fact checkers? Ha!