I’ve never felt like I was part of the so-called “blogging revolution.” Perhaps it’s because, being young and having a technophilic father, I’ve never really been without the internet and so find the idea of blogging to be a rather obvious one. The essence of blogging is the same as the essence of the internet: people collect information that is interesting to them and make this information available to anyone with an internet connection, with or without commentary. The only real difference between blogging and the rest of the internet, as near as I can tell, is the frequency with which the information is updated. Perhaps this is why I don’t feel like I’m part of the blogging revolution: because I feel that people who refer to a blogging revolution think that the internet revolution has already come and gone having been charted by the dot-com boom and bust. To me, the blogging revolution is a small part of the larger, on-going internet revolution that we haven’t really begun to see the full impact of, yet.
So when I read that the World Economic Forum had a session this past weekend on blogging (specifically, the session is titled “Will Mainstream Media Co-Opt Blogs and the Internet?”) I couldn’t help but chuckle a little bit. I don’t think that the mainstream media will ever be able to co-opt the internet entirely because the internet is, by its nature, a decentralized medium. New servers and new sites can always be created and connected to the internet, allowing for ways around the mainstream media’s servers and sites. I can conceive of only two impediments to the decentralized nature of the internet. On impediment is corporate regulation in two forms: by means of software that cannot go to sites that haven’t been certified by the company or companies producing the operating system and web browser, or by means of search engines that won’t register sites that haven’t been certified by the search engine’s founders and funders, either of which would create a monopoly and prevent customers from finding viable alternatives. The other impediment is government regulation along the lines of the FCC’s regulation of television and radio. Thankfully the first impediment can be conquered by open source software and its infinite, easy mutability (unless the operating system begin to be hardwired into the computer systems themselves, in which case alternative chip manufacturers, be they companies or pirates, would pop up). The second impediment is not currently an issue as the range of the internet is theoretically infinite, meaning that a server that is illegal in the United States can be moved to a friendlier country without much problem.
Blogging as a method of communication can’t be co-opted by the mainstream media any more than the internet can be because of the server issue I just mentioned. I do think, though, that the line between blogs and the mainstream media is going to become fuzzier. Right now blogs are defined largely by their small size, their independence, the frequency with which they update, and (in many cases) their degree of interactivity. In other words, if the New York Times were run like a blog Paul Krugman could write a new column every day instead of just on Tuesdays, his Wednesday column on economics could be significantly longer than his Thursday column on his dissatisfaction with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD sets, and you could comment on his articles directly without having to go through him or an editor. (Unless, of course, he runs his column like Andrew Sullivan or Josh Marshall in which case you can’t comment; personally, I think this is rather arrogant but that could just be me.)
Things like what I described with Paul Krugman are already happening in the mainstream media. The print and digital political magazines are starting to have blogs, either written anonymously or written by specific pundits. Usually these are single-topic blogs, but not all of them are. Slate has a more or less free-for-all comment system called the Fray (although it’s obvious from comments made in their articles that the writers for Slate consider themselves quite above the Fray).
Meanwhile some blogs seem to be becoming more like interactive, free-form versions of online magazines with the posters writing what are essentially articles (rather than two or three sentence link posts) and usually, gasp, entering into the comment threads to discuss their works. A precious few blogs, like the Daily Kos are becoming hybrids between the aforementioned interactive magazines and a community with blogs within the blog.
(An aside: I’ve noticed that when it comes to write political blogs, bloggers who had established themselves previously through opinion pieces in news papers and magazines are significantly less likely to allow comment threads or to respond to comments in the comment threads than those who were not established pundits when they started blogging. Compare Atrios and Josh Marshall on the left or Andrew Sullivan and Tacitus on the right and you may see what I’m talking about.)
Billmon, who is attending the World Economic Forum for his day job, attended the session on blogs and posted his thoughts on the subject. In addition to a number of good comments and observations, he said:
I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. On the one hand, this person clearly didn’t have the faintest idea what the blogs are all about, or why most bloggers do what the [sic] do. She didn’t understand how quickly a major media corporation could take a great blog and run it into the ground. Buy up blogs? It would be like trying to catch snow flakes. [sic]
This is true. The concept of buying up blogs is ludicrous because blogging is a way of using the written word. It’d be as futile as trying to buy up novel-writing or buy up the medium of the short story or, like Billmon said, like trying to catch snowflakes.
I don’t think that this is what Billmon was getting at, though. He seems to be saying that trying to buy up blogs would be like trying to catch snowflakes because the corporate touch would liquidate the blog’s audience by changing its content, thus corporations would be flailing about, buying up blogs, and being frustrated in their efforts as they chased readers away to new blogs. I think that Billmon has a point and yet could still be wrong. I don’t think that corporate contact would be the touch of death for blogs because any smart corporation would begin its relationship with bloggers not by trying to take over control of the blog but through simple sponsorship. “We like what you’re doing and we’d like to pay you $X a year to just keep doing what you’re doing.” The quality of the blog wouldn’t immediately suffer, I don’t think, but it would begin the slow creep of corporate control into the blogsphere. I wouldn’t be surprised if, given a few more years, all of the major blogs were corporate-sponsored, if not outright corporate-owned, with a relatively constant number of unpaid, unknown bloggers. There may be a few big independent bloggers, and while I think they’ll be as well-written I don’t think they’ll be as big as the corporate-sponsored ones.
So far I’ve talked about “blogs” while actually meaning “political blogs.” I’m not sure what the future is for other types of blogs like personal blogs (online diaries) and non-political commentary blogs (like for movies, games, and the like). I keep thinking that we’ll see a rise in the number of personal blogs as more teenagers (not to stereotype, but you know) grow up with the internet and use the internet to communicate with their friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if blogs slowly took over the job of e-mail forwards to share articles with friends and family. (I can see it now: You MUST post this story on your blog within five minutes of reading it or you will never have a girlfriend again! And all the gay men say, “So?”) Then again, forwarding, like spamming, forces your views into a location that people are checking for their own gain whereas a blog requires effort on the part of other people to come to you.
So while I recognize that futurists are almost inevitably full of it, and amateur futurists are even more full of it, I’ll make a prediction on the future of blogging: We’ll see fewer and smaller independent blogs as large, corporate-sponsored blogs eat up the readership, and in some cases the writers, of smaller blogs. And that’s all I’ll commit to. I think that, as Billmon fears later in his aforementioned post, the Golden Age of free-for-all blogging is just about up..
A thought on your observation of “pundits” – those previously published in “print” – not opening their blog up to comment. Having dabbled, over the years, in print publication, you reach a point where you see little point in preaching to the choir, and even less in continuing to piss-off the pinheads. You take a beating, and eventually quit taking the beating.
Case-in-point: about a year a bunch of us in my corner of the websphere were engaged in lively intellegent discussion ‘ore topics as diverse the ERA, art in traffic circles, bigotry, Limbaugh, the lack of public transit… you get the picture. At one point, in a conversation specifically about the ERA and bigotry, I was accused of being a bigot – for suggesting a Clinton/Clark combination would be the best shot at taking back our country. And was Limbaughed big-time – it was classic… the foul language, foul grammatic structures, the foul all caps…
I rarely comment.
Well, I’ll hopefully have something more to add later, but I wanted to mention gawker and gizmodo – two corporate blogs that have had some success. Whether their model can be duplicated elsewhere is something I don’t know.
I’ll see your prediction, and raise you “And by the time that happens, people who are blogging now, and are/were also involved in message board posting and Usenet and apas and zines in the past, will be on to whatever else comes along to supplant blogging.”
Nice post, PDP.
I gotta go with Elayne on this one, PDP. Those of us who blog do so for a variety of reasons,but primarilly among them is a need to get our viewpoints heard. We’ll continue to find a way to do that. I personally think that the blog format is so easy and so suited for political commentary that it will survive in some form for quite a while.
Having found a voice, I doubt that any of us will be willing to give it up. Even for money.
I don’t doubt that those of us who are blogging now will feel compelled to discover a new medium through which we can let our voices be heard. In the same way that blogging seems to have replaced message boards, so too will something replace blogging.
I just think that, ultimately, the time of the blogs is up. The media has seen how powerful blogs can be at shaping opinions (Salaam Pax), at advocating issues (Valerie Plame), and at effecting politics (Howard Dean). It’s not something that the corporations are going to ignore and so what was once the territory of the voices in the wilderness will become the latest corporate suburb along the information superhighway.
It’s okay, though. We’ll have an exodus to somewhere else.
I think the question of cooption (is that a word?) suffers from the old nemesis of assuming it’s either/or. Why not both “yes” and “no”? Sure, some folks in blogging might well go into more “mainstream” or corporate media, but many won’t. And some who should have been grabbed up by now, like The Daily Howler, probably won’t be.
But others will keep doing this and others will join them. After all, this has been going on for years even though it was harder and more expensive to do it, with newsletters, small papers, and self-published books (not all of which are vanity works). Why would it stop when it’s now so much easier and cheaper?
I’ve got a web site (a science site critiquing a fringe theory) that attracts people from all over the world, about a thousand a month now, and that probably won’t rise to more than a few thousand a month at most, ever. What traditional media or publishing company would want those numbers? Yet I can do it, and it’s useful — used, so far, by not only enthusiasts but also students and journalists. It would cost me plenty to try to do that with traditional media; it costs me very little to get a worldwide audience online.
However, the part that Billmon got wrong is that if a company buys your blog, they’re not going to simply buy the name and the space — they’re going to sign you to a contract as part of the buyout. To do otherwise is stupid in the extreme, when the entire thing depends on the writing/research of the people operating it. So they’re not “buying novel-writing” they’re “buying” Stephen King (they hope). This isn’t unknown to the business world, you know.
Not only is it done with publishing, it’s done with businesses of all kinds. In fact, not doing it is often a prelude to failure — while I was in California there was a shop which was the place to take automotive electrical problems; they were incredible. Well, the shop was bought out but they didn’t keep the people. Duhh. 6 months later the original owners bought it back and started fixing things again.
QrazyQat,
I think you said what I was trying to get at in my post. Co-option is not an either/or situation. I specifically made the point that when a corporation buys a blog they’re buying the blogger.
I do feel, though, that when the corporations move in and start to sponser bloggers that a.) a certain degree of editorial control will inevitably start to creep in, b.) the larger blogs, with corporate sponsorship, will cause the number of smaller, non-corporate blogs to decrease.
I didn’t mean to say that you hadn’t thought about those points at all, but that Billmon didn’t seem to, and that they bear repeating at any rate.
Naturally anyone signing up for the bucks is going to lose some freedom in the process, if not right away (“don’t worry, we won’t tell you what to write”) then later. It’ll vary as to how much they lose, just like writing for news etc. now.
I don’t see the others necessarily decreasing in number, though, although I could definitely see the possibility of a bunch of people starting to write what they think will sell rather than what they feel is right, and the hacks will migrate toward the money right off. This happens in all forms of media, I’m sure (thinking John Stossel or Dennis Miller here and their migration toward their present positions).
One main difference is that it will still be far easier to be an IF Stone than it was for IF Stone. Marginal positions, or prefectly sensible positions like my site :) in an area without likely mass appeal will also be far easier than they would.
As a variation on my usual car analogies, another thing I could see as part of media corporate technique with blogs is what happened in the motorcycle business in the US. In the 1960s and 70s the kinds of motorcycles I liked, street-legal bikes modelled on roadracers (cafe racers), were common in Europe but very uncommon in North America. The thinking was that there wasn’t a big enough market to make it worth selling them. What sold were quasi-choppers and touring bikes. Then Honda brought out the Interceptor, which was a corporation-built cafe racer. It was sucessful in its market, but the market was just a fraction of the overall market. But Honda, and later the other big players from Japan, started the technique of making a variety of bikes to fit niche markets like that (and the quasi-choppers and the touring bikes), and they’ve continued doing that since. The result has been to see those niche markets grow, but no one of them has taken over. Meanwhile, the bland middle of the road bike, that did all those things, but none all that well, has tended to disappear in favor of a variety of niche market bikes made by giant corporations.
One other side result of this has been that small manufacturers have been able to compete once again, on the higher end, contrary to expectations that the big corporations’ involvement in these small markets would doom any such efforts. That was interesting, and I don’t think anyone foresaw that.
And just the mention of foreseeing leads me to mention a great book, Futurehype: The Tyranny of Prophecy, by Max Dublin. It’s about the ways that prophecy is used in modern life, how it fails yet often by using it we get constrained by our decisions to follow it.
One important point – when companies ‘buy the blogger’ they are only buying the blogger’s site and online identity – if you decide that you want out, you probably won’t be able to keep your web address or name: “Wunderblog – a cozy site, by Zatrios” all that would have to stay – but you would be able to leave and start another blog elsewhere.
And then there are those of us who blog for our own narcissistic entertainment. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy my blog. It’s about whatever comes to mind on any given day. It exists to vent and babble and let my friends and family know what’s going on in my life. It’s a journal, it’s a letter, it’s … so not marketable. I might take money if someone offered it to me but I think I’d have to have an audience of more than ten people a day for that to happen.
I pretend no knowledge of the future of blogs or what might replace them but am so thankful that they are available to me. For me, a passive visitor I have found in the good blogs like this one an editorial and “ombudsman” function now lamentably absent in mainstream media.
The blogs are not “content providers” (a lovely term invented by the ad sales gnomes) but together they eradicate bullshit and shine lights in dark places. I am an elderly Canadian media junkie who scans around 20 sources daily from around the world. (OK, I’m a bed wetter and what else to do at 5:00am?)
The point I offer is that blogs or their progeny are essential elements in the conduct of democracy.
Good points about the ombudsman function of blogs — it’s sort of like that job has been largely outsourced by media companies, to people that do it cheaper and far better most of the time. Also the business about blogs not being “content providers”; one thing that’s disturbing about most mainstream media at all levels is the way they act, in the majority of their news, as just part of a distribution channel, reprinting lightly edited or unedited copy from wire services and corporate handouts. Also VNRs (video news releases) which are a mainstay of local TV news and are also often seen in the big markets as well. (A couple months ago I saw the airing of an unedited VNR on the Moller Skycar, which is a con job that’s been ongoing for over 3 decades now, on a major station in Seattle. This is BS.) These companies do pretty much just “provide content”; they don’t really sort it, edit it, fact check it — it’s no wonder Google News, using automatic means, does as good a job (maybe better) than many if not most newspapers and news TV and radio. Isn’t that crazy? I mean that should seriously not be possible.
I often use blogs as a means to get myself pointed to stories I very likely wouldn’t find otherwise.
Hasn’t Atrios sort of stepped in with his “sponsorship” idea of selling off the upper left hand corner of his blog for some insane price (to me anyway, probably not that much for him)? When he started it, I think he got one sponsor for a week, someone who just wanted to try it out, or had some excess cash to burn, and to most corporations or corporation-like entities, the prices are pretty much what they would pay on paper-clips for a week, so it’s not that big of a deal, and I don’t imagine they expect much out of it but eyeballs. It didn’t last though, and I haven’t seen one since.
Maybe if Andrew Sullivan is telling the truth and he really is raking in $50-60K a year by having a pledge-drive, maybe that is one way that blogs could become reader-supported and not come under the evil-bad corporate control.
I guess I’m not much of a futurist. But people seem to be trying all sorts of ideas to at least pay for the bandwidth (does blogger even charge for bandwidth?). I tried to start a blog on blogger, but I guessed I messed it up somehow and the blog never actually appeared and I got error screens where there should have been my legendary “test” first blog posting. I sort of gave up after that, realizing that I had nothing to say that I felt comfortable saying to a wide audience. But Tomato-Observer asked me if I wanted to write sometime on her blog and I thought that was so sweet of her. I really would like to, but I really have no idea what to say or even if I did, how to put it in a format that would be at all understandable to anyone.
It’s funny, I used to be a writer and stuff, but life changed and I can’t string two coherent thoughts together anymore and the creativity level of any one of those thoughts really isn’t all that high. I do so very much like reading a really well-written blogger, though. You kids, Jeanne, Billmon, River, anyone who is actually writing and not just throwing out links with snarky comments about them, which I don’t mind so much, but it is sort of tiresome and I don’t see how anyone is really considering that to be worthwhile. I would go so far as to say that I don’t think Atrios would have very many hits if he didn’t have a huge community of commenters who have joined into sort of a community. It is the blog that all the other bloggers go to to talk with each other. Which I find really weird, but I guess it makes sense.
I often read a journal-style blog (with links and wackiness) by mimi smartypants. She actually got a book contract (initiated by the publisher) to compile her journal entries and publish them. Is this another type of “cooptation,” or just recognition that many online thinkers are creating good art (or analysis, depending on their goals) that deserves a wider audience off-line?
Then there are plenty of folks (Josh Marshall of TPM, say, or Neil Gaimon in a different niche) who do writing both on- and off-line, and the two world interact and feed off each other–surely writing short responses to news on a blog is compatible with writing longer researched articles for a major news outlet. It’s all an interesting continuum . . .
http://www.inkspress.com hired Jeremy Wright, a prominent blogger, on an ebay auction Friday Dec 3 for $3350.
What do you think of this new concept of businesses using a blogger to promote their company?
http://www.blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com
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