Whistling Past The Graveyard
The New York Times is again dismissing the weblog phenomenon as a bunch of insignificant nerds talking to themselves, but Bill Quick provides some figures that demonstrate that the blogosphere has orders of magnitude more readers than the New York Times, and Michele gives even more analysis you should read.
Obviously, weblogs run in all sorts of political directions, and honestly there are as many points of view as there are weblog readers and writers. But looked at in the aggregate, anyone who thinks that weblogs as a whole aren't exerting a large and growing influence on the world is fooling himself.
This is almost always the attitude of incumbents toward new things. Many mainframe-oriented I/T people dismissed the PC. People who ran integrated steel companies dismissed the minimills. I remember circa 1997, the CEO of a major telco (AT&T?) said that the Internet was no more of a threat to his business than was ham radio.
Yeah, exactly. Although the funny thing is, blogs aren't a threat to their business. It's a threat to how they deliver their product becuase it's going to require changes. But in terms of the actual business of news, weblogs are a huge boon for them, for weblogs will always be dependent on what they do.
It ain't all political either. Come July, I'll be participating in a blogosphere event for PR professionals, who seem to be among the first in the marketing/promo/ad field to grab onto blogs in a big way.
Funny thing -- for the past few days the old-timers have been discussing what to call this thing. Since I'm not a "dedicated" PR person, but a generalist in book marketing, I took a look at Technorati, Bloglines and Google, only to find the "working" title of Global PR Blog Week had already gotten out and was getting maybe a hundred mentions.
So it's really too late to call it something cute, because you have to consider each blog's readership. Cest la vie.
I found out something else, which was truly bizarre, in my link-seeking. There's somebody at Live Journal that reports on my WOLves blog regularly. I'm gonna phone my husband at work and ask him to bring home his saw, 'cos I'll need to expand the office doorway to make room for my head! ;>)
True to their roots, the organizers of the Democratic National Convention will permit bloggers to get
press passes.
No word yet on the republicans.
This comment on A Small Victory...
""By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs."
The fact that the NYT printed this statistic with no context (i.e., the actual number of online users), while the bloggers are the ones who crunched the numbers to explain how huge the blogosphere's readership actually is, explains everything you want to know about why people prefer blogs.
Especially over the NYT, which is putting on a brave face over its underlying fear.
Posted by: Kimberly at May 28, 2004 12:18 PM"
...says everything about why I'm sitting here reading Dean's World -- and not the on-line edition of what was, once upon a time, a great newspaper.
....Well, actually, not quite everything. Another crucial reason is precisely in the name: Dean's World. A man, not an organization. I read blogs for the same reason I read books: to get an _individual's_ own independent, idiosyncratic view of the world, and his or her unique _style_.