The New Blogocracy is a Salon op-ed that i wrote based on the blog entry Demeaning Bloggers. I tried to go deeper into my feelings about pitting journalists against bloggers. I think that it’s a fun piece.
If you don’t have a Salon account, click the Free Day Pass. NARAL is definitely an organization worth supporting.
Oh, and i’ve also decided that i *lurve* having an editor, particularly one as constructive as Andrew Leonard.
Great article danah–great to see you in “print”.
With regards to the “four primary conceptual paradigms that frame blogging”, I have been thinking about blogging also as a form of correspondence ( http://icite.net/blog/200404/blog_correspondence.html ).
I don’t think I would go so far as calling correspondence a primary conceptual paradigm for blogging, but it may be something of a functional paradigm, i.e., the act of blogging and the function it serves can, in some cases, be compared with corresponding through letters.
Along these lines, I think it might be interesting to consider how broadcast media + phones might have obscured the use of correspondence as one (importantly, personalized) means of conveying news. Blogging, in relation to “news”, may be recapturing this function and fitting it back into our lives shaped by web time/space.
As a trained journalist I wrestle with the question of are bloggers journalist a lot. I think what professional journalist afraid is how blogging subverts journalist functions like gate keeping. Journalist see bloggers as the unwashed masses coming to soil there profession: Bloggers don’t understand you have to have two sources on everything, and they don’t know the first thing about libel law.
I think journalist need to worry less about the bloggers, and more journalist need to blog. I few journalism schools are teaching blogging, but not nearly enough.
Please put the word “are” in the sentence: “I think what professional journalist afraid” to read… ” I think what professional journalist are afraid…”
I’m not sure what happened to my apostrophes.
Danah Boyd on the “New Blogocracy”
Danah Boyd has written a fantastic article for today’s Salon that is an essential read for all bloggers. From Boyd’s
Danah Boyd on the “New Blogocracy”
Danah Boyd has written a fantastic article for today’s Salon that is an essential read for all bloggers. From Boyd’s
This is an amazing reaction from the NYTimes. I’ve been seeing a sort-of-similar process among Persian-language Iranian blogs being attacked by the mainstream press in Iran, but also bloggers attacking each other over rigor and professionalism (mostly professional journalist bloggers attacking non-professionals). There was a huge and fascinating debate in the Iranian blogging community last year about the linguistic and cultural “ebtezaal” (vulgarity) of blogs. I wrote an article about the debate that will be published in the American Anthropologist this December.
I think the fundamental difference between journalism and blogging is not that a newspaper aims for objectivity while a blog recognizes its subjectivity. The big difference is that a newspaper aims to do more than lay out the facts of a story: it aims to be seen as an authority at recognizing which stories are and are not relevant. A blog on the other hand, doesn’t necessarilly have that aim (blogs that do fall on the journalism side of the spectrum). At minimum a blogger aims to write what is relevant for him/her, and to find an audience that finds the blog relevant, while being fully aware that not everyone will or should find it relevant.
Now, think happy thoughts and take off on a slight tangent with me…
If the point of blogging is to match blogs with the audiences who will find them relevant, then one would predict that tools that enable this would be quikly adopted. Tools like comments/trackbacks certainly allow this and have been widely adopted. But, wandering through comments/trackbacks require the user to do a lot of work, exploring other blogs.
Technorati adds some automation to the process of organizing blogs by calculating the most popular blogs. But just as knowing the most popular shows on TV doesn’t necessarilly help you find the shows you’d like to watch, knowing the most popular blogs doesn’t help you find the blogs that you’d be most likely to find relevant. What we need is a tool that can look at any particular person and find the blogs that he/she would find relevant.
This missing blog-matching tool is a collaborative filter. For an example of one, check out http://www.last.fm which uses collaborative filtering to match listeners to the music they are likely to enjoy. Bloglines is doing a coarse form of collaborative filtering to recommend blogs to users, but it’s not very effective. Does anyone know if its being done better anywhere else?
Jolly good danah! Personally, I’ve never much got what blogging has to do with journalism (any more than, say, particpating in a Usenet group or mass-sending family letters), but I think that is an artifact of where I came from.
Danah Boyd’s “New Blogocracy”
Danah Boyd has written a fantastic article for today’s Salon that is an essential read for all bloggers. From Boyd’s
Danah Boyd’s “New Blogocracy”
Danah Boyd has written a fantastic article for today’s Salon that is an essential read for all bloggers. From Boyd’s