When you are a hammer...

When you have a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.
--Someone famous

Science.com examines blogs!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20050504-07480500-bc-us-blogs.xml


An interesting perspective on yet another technology term…

The issue of blogging and the media, as I see it, is that entrenched media interests continue to suffer the delusion that blogging and journalism are the same thing…and that the news establishment’s declining revenues are the result of a never ending amateur hour that recycles black market content. Blogs are a vehicle…like a web page…like email…like a bulletin board…like a mobile phone.

Sure there are blogs run by journalists, but there are also many more blogs that are little more than personal diaries or literary experiments…In either case, the point of blogs is that individuals have control. Individuals can choose to spend their attention with the content they would, both as consumer and producer, as critic and advocate… passive acceptance of what others decide is important is now a matter of individual choice…this trend is not the sole domain of blogs or the youth movement….it’s been underway in force for the last decade online.

What I believe traditional media is learning is that the value of their product is not in line with its price…the blogoshpere’s marketplace of ideas (just another subset of the internet) is correcting this in a way that gets their attention though high profile outings of celebrity new readers. Like any market, there will be mistakes (charlatans, demagogues and professional axe grinders). In that sense, the internet and it’s blogchild are no different than what traditional media has been doing to its audiences for years.

What we can expect is that honest, personally relevant human communication will always have an audience, whatever transmission vehicle it takes. This will not happen with one-size fits all messaging from inhuman corporate entities. To the degree we are able to help our clients connect more intimately with their audience, they should be successful. But like every other product or service hitched to technology’s efficiency machine, professional communication service pricing power will be under pressure to conform to a vastly expanded number of providers.