« Andrew Rasiej just does it! | Main | Stormy Weather » Join the nonrevolution!A New York Times article, "A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip," describes Nick Denton's Gawker Media and Denton's cynicism about the "blog revolution," about which he says "The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe. They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed." So if there's no revolution, the Times reporter, getting that something is happening, calls it a nonrevolution. In fact, the article doesn't address the potential revolution in media and communications. It's really about blogs as business, whether you can make money with a blog, and Denton, one of the few to do so, notes that "no one, least of all him, is becoming rich publishing blogs." Bloggers who are looking for business models could be described as freelance writers trying to disintermediate through self-publishing in a market that's pretty level for all comers at this point. Few individuals will make money blogging, but some will use blogging to reach other, more lucrative gigs, a few will find ways to be viable or at least pay the rent &ndash' I hear that boing boing attracts $40K a month in ad revenues. Some are like me – I like to write, I can relate it to my business as a web/social software consultant/developer, and I try to find minor ways (Google Ads, Amazon Associate links, CaféPress schwag) to make a few bucks as compensation for time spent writing and updating. Not particularly revolutionary, though, because I've been doing similar things since web technology appeared in '92. It's just that the tools are better now, and more accessible, and the time sink is less. Meanwhile there really is a revolution, I think, and it's about gathering so many voices online, in a kind of public commons where anybody's voice might rise above the rest, if only for a moment or two. And where you can aggregate the many voices and discern some sense of vast cyberspace room. As more people publish mindshare will be more fragmented; traditional sources of media will have smaller audiences. Your average 2012 man on the street may be following a dozen small blogs and surfing many more, and doing so in the time he would have committed to television and print media in 1992. And he could be spending part of that time creating his own stuff, as well. Of course there's a whole other political impact of networks and social software that we could address as potentially "revolutionary," but that's a much longer story. (Thanks to Nicole-Anne for the pointer!) Technorati tag: blogging jon posted this at 11:33 AM |
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Another way to think about this is in terms of history. A few years ago I went to Italy, and you couldn't swing a cat without hitting some building put up by a Medici. Don't get me wrong -- it's great when you can hire Michelangelo as your contractor, as the big Ms did for Capelle Medici in Florence. But what about people at the church across town, living at the same time? We don't know anything about them, not even their names -- parish records were destroyed by fire.
Many, many more people are getting their two cents into the historical record than at any time in history. It's still not everybody, and most of it will be lost, but some will survive, and what survives will be a unique historical record -- for instance, unlike previous historical records, it'll contain the life experience of 13 year old girls. It won't be a monochromatic history from only one segment of society.
Posted by: Lisa Williams | May 8, 2005 5:22 PM