So now everyone's getting a blog and it will increasingly eat up our bandwidth _ and will continue to do so as bloggers track back and link back to other bloggers ad nauseam like a dog chasing its tail. And yes, I have been ranting about this since before they suggested that bloggers would see the extinction of the species we now know as journalists.
My biggest beef is this: Don't they know we've been through this in the media and on the Internet countless times before? Surely one media organisation or commentator could have pointed to the fact that this is not that different to the Usenet service of the early Internet days. Okay, so it's not exactly the same, but there are enough similarities to make a connection.
Usenet's newsgroups also provided a forum for like-minded people to discuss single subjects, whether it was technology or tapestry or anything else. There were also star posters _ people who gave their views on a daily basis and whose views were sought out by a large-ish audience. They were also a good source of non-mainstream news on a particular topic, good for publicising an event or two, and a useful place for forward-thinking journalists to go to for leads. All of the above pretty well sums up the attraction of web logs, I would have thought.
But it's not just Usenet that was a precursor to today's blogging outbreak. People or groups have been doing something similar with web sites since the beginning, with Matt Drudge's Drudge Report an obvious example. But an even simpler _ and longer-standing _ medium for someone or an organisation to create a news source is through the humble email list.
Dave Farber, one of the pioneers of the Internet and a former chief technologist of the FCC, runs an email list called IP (which actually stands for Interesting People rather than the protocol). It's probably one of the most active forums I've encountered and certainly has some of the best insights into telecoms and Internet technology and policy you're likely to find anywhere. Certainly there's no blog equivalent and Farber himself doesn't seem to have felt the need to create one.
So that gets rid of myth number one _ blogs aren't really new, rather they're a continuation of a long-standing tradition of using the Internet as a form of one-to-many communications. Myth number two is that suddenly everyone will become a journalist and the media as we know it will not exist.
Of course, the fact that the earlier forms of Internet communications didn't wipe out dominant media already accounts for myth number two. But I think it's also worth looking at who these bloggers are that are going to change the face of reporting. The fact is, any technology blog worth visiting is either written by a technology luminary _ Tom Evslin, the founder and former CEO of ITXC is a recent new addition to the world of blogging and a good example _ or an existing technology writer who also reports for the mainstream media, such as Silicon Valley reporters Om Malik and Dan Gillmore (who recently wound up his Silicon Valley eJournal).
In the case of people like Tom Evslin, they're read because of their industry knowledge, not their reporting skills, besides which they're never going to accept the meager wages that journalism has to offer in any case. Of course, there will also be some that slip through the cracks _ an outsider who's neither luminary nor hack _ who creates a web log and finds a loyal following. And any mainstream media firm that's thinking smartly is probably going to offer that person a job (which they'll no doubt take, because running a blog has even less pecuniary rewards than writing for a company).
Don't get me wrong _ I'm an avid follower of most of the worthwhile tech blogs out there. But they really are just one of many additional sources of information that have always existed.
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