Former CEO of FeedBurner (blog services and tools provider) FakeSteve.blogspot.com (musings by a Steve Jobs imposter); Publishing2.
com (new media and the future of online publishing); Blog.Photoblogs.org (aggregates the best of the photoblogs) When I was a kid, there were three broadcast TV channels that everybody was subscribed to, a couple of local papers and a handful of local radio stations with significant range.
For all these broadcasters, a community of interest was defined as all the households this broadcast is reaching, so there was no real concept of targeted content or communities of interest. If you happened to be interested in venture capital and were a college student living in Detroit, there was no way for you to participate (an important term) in any community of interest around venture capital unless you moved to Silicon Valley or paid a ridiculous sum of money to subscribe to an obscure newsletter. On the publishing side, the barriers to entry were replete with all manner of government regulation, massive capital requirements and steep learning curves, creating a natural status difference between publishers and subscribers.
The publishers had massive status, the subscribers little or none. The Internet destroyed most of the barriers to publication. The cost of being a publisher dropped to almost zero with two interesting immediate results: anybody can publish, and more importantly, you can publish whatever you want.
With the cost of publication at almost zero, the cost of subscribing to almost any community of interest also dropped to zero. Anybody can publish and anybody can subscribe, and publishers and subscribers are now two sides to the same coin. Any subscriber can actively participate in any community of interest by becoming a publisher in that community.
Everything is challenged and no media provider is immune from open public questioning. This is true across the spectrum of publishers. A VC blog written by an expert in Silicon Valley with 20 years' experience is subject to counterpoints from the student in Detroit who's similarly passionate about this community of interest.
The challenge, of course, is that in a media democracy, it is incumbent on all of us to determine how we make decisions about authenticity and authority in media, since these traits are no longer an implicit (if sometimes unwarranted) artifact of publication. A Universe of Rumors One by one, Marshall McLuhan's wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective "news" reports but only to what the drums say, i.
e., rumors. And there you have blogs.
The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way. Blogs are an advance guard to the rear. For example, only a primitive would believe a word of Wikipedia (which, though not strictly a blog, shares the characteristics of the genre).
The entry under my name says that in 2003 "major news media" broadcast reports of my death and that I telephoned Larry King and said, "I ain't dead yet, give me a little more time and no doubt it will become true." Oddly, this news supposedly broadcast never reached my ears in any form whatsoever prior to the Wikipedia entry, and I wouldn't have a clue as to how to telephone Larry King. I wouldn't have called him, in any case.
I would have called my internist. I don't so much mind Wikipedia's recording of news that nobody ever disseminated in the first place as I do the lame comment attributed to me. I wouldn't say "I ain't" even if I were singing a country music song.
In fact, I have posted a $5,000 reward for anyone who can write a song containing the verb forms "am not," "doesn't," or "isn't" that makes the Billboard Top Twenty.
News RSS