You’re so vain, you probably think this blog is about you.
Is the blogosphere nothing more than a vanity press? Jay’s post, Lighten Up Keen, citing one entrepreneur’s low opinion of amateur bloggers, got me thinking. If there’s one thing that I believe the internet and social networking has proven, it’s that if you’re thinking about something, someone else probably is too. Andrew Keen is not the only one thinking about what bloggers are doing to traditional media. The media is watching closely, and the stakes are serious–as in a $2,000 wager placed on the long-term prediction archive site longbets.org.
A bet by Dave Winer–placed in 2002–claims the following:
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times‘ web site.
Putting up stakes against this claim is Martin Nisenholtz at, where else, the New York Times.
Winer explains the powerful trend and what it means to traditional media giants:
“…we’re returning to what I call amateur journalism, people writing for the public for the love of writing, without any expectation of financial compensation.” It is the big publishing houses he says, that will have to figure out “…how to remain relevant in the face of a population that can do for themselves what the BigPubs won’t.” And this leads him to his prediction, “…in five years, the publishing world will have changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.”
It’s 2007, and the deadline for this bet is fast approaching. One amateur to another, I think the blogosphere is about to prove Winer is correct, and I’m not the only one. A longbets.org poll shows that out of roughly 300 people surveyed, 66 percent agree with Winer.
But hey, don’t read too much into it–we’re just a bunch of amateurs.
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Chris Ammon said,
on July 9th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Even if Winer wins, isn’t there a difference between showing up high in Google and being a credible news source? We may be headed toward amateur journalism, as he puts it, but that’s hardly the same thing as people writing for the love of writing. How about writing for fame? Writing to sway opinion? Writing to spin facts–or lies?
If popularity can win over accuracy or credibility where are we headed? Wait, that sounds like politics.
Eric said,
on July 10th, 2007 at 10:43 am
That’s a good point. Popularity should not be a substitute for accuracy or credibility. But the case can be made, as it is by Winer, for the credibility of the individual blogger over the trusted publishing company. Even the biggest publisher, he points out, can only draw from a limited number of journalists, and consequently can not compete with the breadth and depth of knowledge and experience of independent amateur bloggers worldwide. No one person can be an expert in everything, so big publishers have to rely on the idea that “the reporter doesn’t really need to know anything about the topic he or she is covering”. In many cases I think that an article written by an individual expert in their own field, as many bloggers are, could rightly be considered more relevant, more credible, and likely more accurate than something written by a journalist at a big publisher whose expertise is not in that field.