digitaldust

I find it very interesting that blogging is becoming very professional. The bloggers that seem to devote an awful lot of time or are paid to spend an awfully large amount of time filtering and condensing other media are the ones that get all the attention. A good example is Corante which seems to have co-opted a bunch of bloggers, writers and commentators to work in it’s blog mine. Also the bigger collective blogs seem to have either incredibly gifted multitaskers or poor sods working full time out of their bedrooms.

There’s a lot of talk about blogs being a new form of media, that they are revolutionary or even that they are a new form of community software. That’s all crap!

The web itself is a new publishing medium, and there have only been progressive changes and improvements over the last 12 years, but Blogger or Moveable Type could have been around 10 years ago. Bloggers would have had a smaller audience, they would probably have been more tech focused but they could still have been around. The technology is not radically new but the people are and they are there due to the availability and the change of the way the technology is viewed. It is now an easily available tool that can be used by everyone. Low barrier to entry and all that.

The big reason for the blog explosion happening now is the type of people that are involved due to this availability. There are an awful lot of non-techies blogging, maybe many are geeks, lightweight techs or early adopter types, but they are mostly not people who would build their own software to blog. They are users, not makers, that’s the primary difference. In fact the winners in the blogging department, and probably the best bloggers on the whole are the designers and the journalists. They tend to be more concerned with the audience, not the tools/medium itself. Gross generalisation I know, but that is what I enjoy doing.

One of the attractive things about reading blogs is that they are opinionated. They tend to be media filters and generally are not much more than commented link posting. Mine included when I can keep up and not get distracted. They are not much more than “Hey look at this, isn’t it cool.” They secret, like any other media is finding one you like, someone else’s opinion and media bias that you agree with and then use them as a smart filter. Easier than creating agent software to go out and find content for you, just use someone that is enough like you. The brevity of the entries is also good. In today’s time pressured world the bare essentials are the best. Just a few lines that might tease your interest and if they do you will follow it off to what is usually a longer piece of content.

I don’t think that this is anything new either. Media is inherently biased, blogs as a new phenomena are just admittedly biased, something that much of contemporary media goes out of its way to deny. People consume media that is palatable to them, that contains what they want to consume and not what they don’t. They want media with the same set of tastes and opinions as them. Along come 1 million plus blogs and viola you’re more than likely to find a couple that contain stuff you like.

Nothing new that I’ve said here either. Just a few sparks set me off. The professionalisation of the blogging world and the general hype that surrounds blogs.