Jane Hamsher has an interesting post on the nature of blogging. She talks about how it's a "two-way street" and allows the people to organically determine what they consider to be important. To me, the most important achievement of the blogosphere is the dawning of reader control of content. For as long as there's been print media for sale, there have been these curious animals called editors who try to decide what they think you want to hear about. They may get pretty close to nailing it from time to time, but sooner or later you're going to get a front page story about some cat stuck in a tree while the really important stuff is buried on page 9. With the Internet, there's no guessing process. No market research. No decisions about what goes on the front page. No one has to guess what you, the interested reader, wants to hear about. We rate up stories in Yahoo news. We recommend diaries on Kos. We flood Technorati with links to certain articles, topics, keywords, stories. We decide what's important. If you want to release that bit of bad news on Friday afternoon and hope that it goes away, go right ahead, but the truth is it will go away only when WE decide it does.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
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