Tim Almond

I remember seeing a programme in 1996 on Channel 4 about the Internet called, I think, J’Accuse: The Internet hosted by Janet Street-Porter, criticising it as a nothing more than a home for nerds. In 1996, it largely still was. The content was frequently from academics, and there was little in the way of on-line shopping.

The web gradually evolved. Shopping took off, and many existing industries in areas like bricks-and-mortar retailing were dented by it. Companies like eBay and Lastminute.com took advantage of the speed of the internet to create completely new business models. Businesses hooked up to each other via the internet for data exchange, saving costs. The technology disrupted a whole host of existing businesses.

The speed of the internet makes evolution happen much faster. Switching who you buy books from isn’t as hard as it once was - driving to the next market town to buy books. The competition is a URL away.

In the past it was possible to start a new newspaper or magazine. But it required a lot of investment in printing and marketing to make it a success. Someone writing a fanzine on The Fall had a major hurdle to reach all the fans.
So, evolution of the media was slow.  

There are 3 important things about blogging vs newspapers:-

1.  it’s very, very cheap to publish. Sign up with Blogger and you can do it for nothing. The whole world can reach you.
2. Marketing is more about merit than price. Good blogs will get linked by people who like them which not only drives hits that way, but typically moves the blog up the Google index.
3. Your behaviour is under review. Newspapers have long been able to make cosy deals with the people they deal with in various ways. Readers had no real way to address this. If a blogger decides to "sell out", and someone spots it, it can spread like wildfire now. So, we have faster evolution in countering bad copy.

There’s also the nature of how easy it is to get advertising. You don’t need an ad department, just follow some simple instructions and start presenting ads.

Personally, I think the whole thing is really exciting. We will see more and more received opinions in life challenged, and hopefully, we will see more enlightened people around the world. We will see much of the journalistic clique disappear, and instead more challenges.

The SCO vs IBM lawsuit showed Eric Raymond and Pamela Jones of Groklaw, neither of them "journalists" doing the real investigation work, while the existing commercial IT media did little more than print press releases. As blogging moves further out of the arena of technologists, we’ll see more of this.

It’s still in its infancy. Many bloggers will tail off. But any journalists who think it’s going to disappear should think again.

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Tags: Technology //