Chekhov's Mistress
Most Things Underground Tend to Surface
I suppose it’s like noticing white Toyotas on the road once you have one, but blogs seem to be getting a lot of press lately. Lit blogs get noticed in a Book Babes article on Poynter On-line (link from Beatrice). Lit blogs have gotten their fair share of attention, but it is the news and political blogs in this election season that are really getting talked about.
The serious press have even devoted some ink to blogs, like this article on The Financial Times website, called Blogs and Bias, which is really an article about media fragmentation. But among other things, the article says that bloggers were quicker to the punch on the CBS forged W documents than the rest of the press.
How do they do it? Read Maud Newton’s Maisonneuve article that is as much about obsession as blogging.
Even the Economist has mentioned blogs in context of the media several times and recently has carried an article called Golden Blogs where they point out, in their economist way that “it also creates small, tight groups of readers that could make ideal target audiences for advertisers. Like search engines, once considered loss leaders, there is therefore an opportunity for ‘monetising something cool’…”
Interestingly, when I was at the World Leadership Forum this week, one of the tech panels included a top exec at Gartner, who, on top of all the exciting technical hahoos he mentioned, seemed most excited about the Wiki concept, imbodied by the Wikipedia site that I mentioned in an earlier post.
Why is that interesting? Of all the exciting technical gadgets, the one thing that is most exciting to this guy who lives and breaths technology is the relatively low-tech concept of Wiki, which is similar to a blog, but is more collaborative in that others can add to and edit work over time.
I think blogs may head that way in time and we’ve already seen some excellent collaboration at The Reading Experience with dueling book reviews.
Other developments include All Consuming, a site that tracks blog comments on books, and Kinja, a site trying to tame the vastness of blogs into a portal format.
So, as the editor of Maisonneuve says in the Oct/Nov issue (the one with the Maud article on blogging), “most things underground tend to surface.”
(Access to some articles may require subscription or registration)
Read widely, think well, and write often.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: September 25, 2004
- Filed Under:
Litbloggers & Blog Floggers
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
