The Rise and Fall of Blogs 433
i-Love-to-blog writes "Blogs have revolutionized information delivery. They not only made the world much more smaller, but a lot more personal, united and un-afraid as well. Events like the September 11 attacks and the Iraq invasion made news channels take a back seat. Wired claimed blogs to be what Napster was to music. They even have a wager on Weblogs outranking the New York Times Web site by 2007. People got paid to blog. Then they got fired for that. Some lost money for blogging their ideas. Most just hand out links these days. When was the last time your favorite blogger talked sense? Have blogs reached a saturation point? Blogging burnout is a humorous look at the rise and fall of weblogs."
Bet URLs (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Blog Burnout is for the Ultra-HIp (Score:4, Informative)
It is a community where a large number of people have discussions (and flame each other) about various news topics.
A weblog is one-way 'entertainment'.
Re:Blog Burnout is for the Ultra-HIp (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:2, Informative)
Well, then there's Christopher Allbritton, a freelance journalist [back-to-iraq.com] who happens to run a blog.
back-to-iraq [back-to-iraq.com]
I really don't consider his "postings" to be merely ego stroking or blathering about nothings, and for myself it's certainly been a source of insight into the goings on over there; at least, it provides some perspective to weigh against the slug fest broadcast over the traditional news media wires. The reader feedback (comments) is even, at times, compelling.
While it's true that in blogs there are more journals than journalists, I also think it quite snooty to believe that blogs are trivial just because they're blogs.
Re:Rise and FALL? (Score:1, Informative)
That's bullshit, unless you want to argue that the media had no standards before blogging existed. The fact is that the media holds itself to these standards because journalists believe that they have a professional obligation to report the news accurately, not because they are afraid of bloggers.
Yes, the media sometimes crosses the line in its eagerness to get a story, the aforementioned memogate being a good example. But that doesn't happen very often, a point made obvious by the fact that everyone is shocked and outraged whenever it does happen.
Blogs really haven't been much as much of a threat to big media as some have made them out to be. Rather got caught out on the memogate story and everyone starts praising blogs as the Next Big Thing ready to knock old media off its pedestal.
But that was it. There have been no other instances of blogs showing up old media. In fact, it has usually gone the other way. Remember the mini-scandal that occurred during the Terri Schiavo case where a talking point memo surfaced that supposedly speculated about how Republicans could benefit from the spectacle? Right wing bloggers went into overdrive trying to disprove the validity of the memo, right up to the point that a Republican member of Congress admitted that the memo came from his office.
Or how about the Newsweek scandal? Bloggers thought they were looking at a repeat of memogate until evidence surfaced that the Army had been investigating allegations of Koran desecration at Gitmo for the last 2-3 years. They even had to back down off the assertion that the Newsweek article caused deaths in Afghanistan when they couldn't verify that anyone had actually been killed. Army generals in Afghanistan denied that the story had anything to do with the riots. Even Newsmax (a right wing news site) did a little investigation and determined that there was no evidence that the Newsweek story did any harm.
Blogs are held to the same standards as other sources of information--if people discover that they are erroneous, they won't pay attention any more and go somewhere else for information.
Bullshit again. Dan Rather lost his job because of his error. How many bloggers connected with the two examples I gave have suffered a similar fate? Not a damn one. They are still there writing and still seem to be as popular as they were before. They have not been held accountable by anyone.
Re:"Objectivity"? (Score:2, Informative)