Saturday, November 24, 2007

I'm Late Getting to This .....

..... but it remains a very good point to start a discussion of blogging, and attempts by established media to incorporate blogs into their content ..... to be more specific, bringing blogs within guidelines already in place for the established media - and how that is NOT necessarily a good thing.

This post on Michael Silence's blog, No Silence Here, begins, "This hyper-management of blogs is symbolic of doing business in D.C., like trying to get a new passport. Leave it to the big boys to come along and ruin a good thing. They've taken it from blogging to blogged down."

The post focuses on our nation's capital (particularly the Washington Post), but I suspect these issues are being debated in most parts of the country, in media markets big and small.

His post also includes an informal primer on blogging ..... and while some of you might consider many of his points to be crashing glimpses of the obvious, they are important points nonethless, and worth sharing as a means of encouraging this growing, developing medium.

I would really, really, REALLY like to know what you think about Michael's post!

2 comments:

Eric Siegmund said...

Jeff, I'm not sure what kind of discussion you're expecting this to generate. The post in question doesn't seem to plow any new ground.

In my opinion, the strength of blogging as a medium is its diversity, and the blogosphere is big enough to comfortably accommodate all kinds of sites and styles and points of view (edited or otherwise).

There was probably a time in my early blogging "career" when I would have been cynical about "micro-managed" blogs, but I'm not anymore. My Latin isn't up to the task, but I think the term caveat emptor could be modified to apply to the reader.

Jeff said...

Eric, a good point that you bring up is that the medium - AND the many viewpoints of its practitioners - is changing, growing, developing, whatever ..... and that seems like a good thing to me.

I suspect there will always be those who hold to very specific views of what is - and is NOT - a blog ..... but that has been the case for other media, as well.