Bloggers the Tech World's New Elite? 224
Carl Bialik writes "Wall Street Journal tech columnist Lee Gomes says that the top tech blogs 'aren't part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world's new elite. Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it's not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.'"
Please stop using that word (Score:2, Interesting)
"Blogosphere" sounds even worse. I will never utter that word as long as I live.
No. Next question. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bloggers are hot shit the same way desktop linux is hot shit. Everybody doing it thinks it's the coolest damned thing since the toaster. Nobody else gives a shit.
(disclaimer : I blog [deadcityradio.org].)
Bloggers can be friends (Score:4, Interesting)
My mostly unread blog [only about a dozen regular readers who aren't family or close friends] still has people finding it, and using the information on it. Unlike a newspaper, they aren't as shy about asking me a question about my content, and I'm more likely to give a personalized response to a request for additional info.
Ummm... No. (Score:4, Interesting)
aren't part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world's new elite.
No - no, they are not. Mayhap the person(s) forming this opinion should venture into the "tech world" one of these days.
bloggers:tech_world_elite::script_kiddies:securit
Does it matter if they're bloggers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Blogs Are Here To Stay And The Impact Will ODeepen (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest reason Blogs have become so very popular, and why they are here to stay in growing numbers is because they made publishing online easy for everyone. Blogs don't require you to know HTML before you can publish your ideas online. Just type your thoughts into a form, and the software builds the code automatically.
So, Blogs dramatically reduced the "friction" to publishing online. Millions of non-geeks now have their say.
If you mentally replace the word "Blog" with "Home Page" in any article you read online, it'll seem like you've stepped back in time to the dawn of the Web. That's how people talked about the web a few years ago.
Blogs have accelerated grass roots democracy, leaching the "Mass" from Media, splintering it into untold numbers of demassified niches. The impact is very big and will deepen.
I recently finished a piece on the impact of new digital media upon the mass media called: " Mass Media, By And For The Masses [blogspot.com]. It makes the case that the london transit bombings represent the birth of emergent mass media and will force mass media in all forms, to take it's rightful place as another niche.
In a nutshell, Mass media will be good for mass events. But Blogs represent the birth of grass roots media. Aggregated through RSS, they'll soon out-perform mainstream.
The Honeymoon Is Over (Score:3, Interesting)
From TFA:
I think the message is clear. Blogs may not offer quantity of suckers^H^H^H viewers, but they do offer quality of viewers. With one link in the right blog, the marketing man can pay to reach the exact people he could only hope of catching by chance in other media. This isn't just a marketing pipe dream. Bribing bloggers is about to become big business.
One could hope that the blogging community will be steadfast enough to resist the oncoming corruption, but it's hard to be steadfast after some oily marketing representative has just stuffed your face in a nice restaurant and shacked you up with a four star hotel room.
Be prepared. A lot of blogs, not all, but a lot, are about to pull a great big "Driver 3: 9/10" on various items. I'd guess the form this will take will be hyping new technologies, languages and frameworks, rather than blatantly plugging products. Think the hyping of Java, only for whatever new tech rolls around next time.
If the marketers are really good, and they are, the bloggers may not even know they've been bought.
The fallacy of blogosphere egalitarianism (Score:5, Interesting)
The digerati are cheering the blogosphere, hailing it as the falling of the final barrier to the open public medium that the Internet was supposed to be -- in much the same way that the creation of the Wiki is seen as the long-awaited achievement of the knowledge-network that the hypertexted Web was supposed to be.
But of course the digerati are cheering the blogosphere -- it's their personal domain.
As the theory goes, the blogosphere makes it so anyone at all can put their interests, views, and discoveries on their blog, some portion of the Internet masses (especially blog-readers) will see it, share it, spread it around. Each person can be their own broadcast tower, theoretically equal in visibility and reach potential to anyone else.
Except it's not quite like that (bandwidth and space limitations being only part of the antithesis). There is a subtle, unspoken but implicit "popular Darwinism" that occurs in this process. As it is the digerati that does much of the reading and spreading, it is the digerati that ends up doing the saying of what gets read and spread.
Certainly a few well-placed blogs have launched otherwise typical netizens into the ranks of the digerati -- Rob Malda, Philip Kaplan, Drew Curtis to name a few off the top of my head. And to some extent, they deserve some sort of recognition of being the first to come up with certain online concepts.
As a result, though, they also each help hold the keys to the gate of the blogosphere. And despite being independent, free-willed individuals, capable of making their own value judgements, a barrier to entry into the slipstream of the blogosphere manages to form among them. Despite being controlled in only limited amounts by individual people, only certain elements make it through this cultural elite.
Of course, not all of the "blogerati" are on the mountain because of their blogging pluck; some are there because they have always been there, in the digerati circles, which is doubly reflexive: being in the digerati means, by definition, that they will try to be on top of any new "hip" Net development; and by being digerati, they will get an boosted amount of attention when they do so.
It would be wonderful if the blogosphere was truly an open community. The thought that there really could be an open exchange of information (casual or otherwise) that people could contribute to, and that information be assessed and categorized, and be available to those who were looking for it or had an interest in it, is one that brings forth feelings of true community, egalitarianism, and diversity. Instead, it is a sort of random quasi-natural selection, where some are in, and some are out, and there is no real reason to it.
You had a better chance to get read in 1997 by posting to Usenet than you do in 2005 posting to Slashdot.
The only people who find bloggers important... (Score:5, Interesting)
"World's New Elite", I Don't Know About That (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know... I tried to cite a handful of reputable and well known bloggers (I won't mention any names) in an essay that I wrote last year for a science class at uni. However, my first draft was handed to me with red lines through each reference to a blogger in my bibliography, along with a comment to include "real sources".
Do people generally feel that bloggers are not reliable sources or was that a personal bias from my professor?
Re:Please stop using that word (Score:1, Interesting)
Some blogs are just online journals. (LiveJournal, MySpace, etc)
Others are online news sites. The software behind it simply enables non-tech users to host and maintain their own news websites. Slashdot is a blog of this sort. So is A List Apart (http://www.alistapart.com/ [alistapart.com]). In addition, there are plenty of news-as-blogs that use the blog format for an otherwise common and acceptable medium.