While the word “blogs” gets thrown around allot, it is mostly misunderstood and often mis-represented by the mainstream press. Blogging software, the blogosphere, and bloggers themselves represent nothing short of a shift in the paradigm of how regular folks use the web and of how news is published.
Back in the old days (the nineties) web site operators were focused on publishing information on the web that users of a site consumed. Companies chased banner ad dollars publishing articles and individuals published their home pages – and the visitors of their sites read their content and that was the end of the transaction.
These days’ bloggers use a software platform that allows them to publish content that encourages participation instead of just publishing static content. While most large companies are still publishing content as if the web was just a newspaper in a monitor most individuals are not publishing home pages these days – they are publishing blogs that allow visitors to their sites to participate.
Users can comment on stories, grab the sites RSS feed and aggregate it , write their own blog entries and track back to the original, and do a number of other participatory activities that are simply not possible with the web 1.0 read only model.
Blogs have allowed the average internet user to have a dynamic platform for publishing their information – and that platform creates innumerable uses of their published content. While a decade ago these types of platforms were well beyond the reach of individual users both in terms of cost and technology, these days it is just a simple to set up a blog as it is to publish as traditional home pages, and in many ways, much easier. Further, since the content is published through a platform and not by uploading html pages of varying quality this content has a much better chance of conforming to standards – and the data itself (think RSS) is available in a defacto standard format.
The participatory culture of blogs has lead to a phenomenon called the blogosphere which is the collective knowledge, viewpoint, and chattering of the citizen media. That is, the collective decides what the most important stories of the day are and not the suits that run the traditional, corporate news organizations.
Sites like Technorati try and collect and aggregate all of the information that is pushed out into the blogosphere and make sense of it. While these types of tools are in their infancy they are already having a large effect on the collective consciousness of Netizens. For example the blogosphere was way out ahead of traditional media on the whole Jeff Gannon / James Guckert story and even influenced the traditional media’s reporting of it.
While traditional media has a vested interest in downplaying and even ridiculing the citizen media phenomenon by asserting that bloggers are not journalists, I would suggest that neither is Paula Zahn much less the aforementioned Mr. Guckert. The blogosphere and the collective knowledge therein is an alternative to the incestuous corporate media that holds itself out as the 4th estate. With a few notable exceptions (Lou Dobbs, PBS’ News Hour, etc.) I find that the blogosphere is much truer to the spirit of Edward R. Murrow then Judith Miller is.
Furthermore the blogosphere opens up a dialog about issues that the strictures of traditional media simply can’t allow. If a well know blogger publishes a story that is complete baloney, he is going to get called (through comments, trackbacks, other posts, etc.) on it and his reputation will be diminished. If Sean Hanity rattles of lie after lie there is no recourse. You could write to Fox News but your letter is not going to read on the air, it’s not going to be posted on their website, and Mr. Hanity is not going to address your comments.
Blogging software not only gives everyone a printing press, but it allows everyone else the ability to interact, mash up, comment on, and help disseminate the original content. More importantly all of this dynamic content comes together to create something else – something larger then the parts – and all of this data is useable by interested parties since it is published in defacto standards. While web logs are not revolutionary, the platform’s that were created initially to enable the publishing of them and the collective data that has been published with them certainly are.
