Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html">http://www.shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html</a><br /><br />Clay Shirky is one of the most interesting people I've ever met. I've been subscribing to his newsletter for the past year or so and his latest just came in. If you like to read provocative essays on current happenings in technology, mostly related to the internet in some form or fashion, you <a href="http://ernie.webservepro.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/nec">definitely need to subscribe to his newsletter</a>.

[Brad Adrian]

Hmmm. I think Clay brings out some very interesting points. However, I think what he does NOT cover sufficiently is the impact and importance of QUALITY. I will not pay for a Pocket PC book written by a 6-year-old, because even if the content is compelling, the writing quality is not. I WILL pay for a Pocket PC book written by a professional who knows how to adequately express himself.

So, dilution or not, I still think there is a place for this kind of publishing. The financial rewards might be very elusive, but there are plenty of times when people still prefer quality to quantity.

[johncj]

It never ceases to amaze me that apparently intelligent people think that everything that happens on the Internet is a "radical break with the past." Weblogs are neither new nor interesting. Avenues for cranks to spew forth their opinions have been free for a long, long time. Letters to the Editor didn't put newspaper editors out of business and weblogs won't have any impact on professional writing. You can go hear rock bands for free in almost any city on earth, but professional musicians still get paid. If you produce content with value to others, you can get paid for it. If you prefer to give it away, that's fine too. There's a big "real" world out there, and if you ignore its lessons, you're just ignorant, not a "new thinker".

[Scott R]

I found this to be an excellent read (see, even Ed and I can agree on rare occassions). I also agree that the issue of quality was not addressed sufficiently, however. However, just as a small-time publisher of a print newsletter who is new and/or not very good can often afford to "keep at it" as a hobby, poor web publishing authors can afford to "keep at it" as a hobby because they're low web traffic won't require much of them in terms of hosting costs. Conversely, a good author/editor of a web site can get money in advertising and perhaps even subscriptions but will have to pay out a larger amount in hosting costs. In the end, the internet "changed everything" in terms of the accessibility of information, but the jury is still out as to whether or not it significantly changed whether or not a good web publisher will be able to sustain a living off of this new medium 5 years from now.

Scott

[Scott R]

As a follow-up note, I think that the internet is going though some growing pains right now. We suffered through the dot-bomb era (terrible-twos?). People are still trying to figure out just how the internet "changes everything."

I have to think that some form of payment for quality information will emerge in some form of another, but as with the traditional media there will be low-cost/free alternatives to those who can find them and the market will dictate what is fair and reasonable in terms of subscription costs (or however this market will work).

I think that the additional information that advertisers are able to glean from their web advertising is a double-edged sword which, thus far, has cut deep into the webmasters. When they started to analyze the data and determined just how small a percentage of people were clicking on their ads they concluded that web advertising was a lost cause and they decided to keep most of their money in "traditional" advertising. But my hunch is that the "click-through rate" (i.e. - how many people actually pay attention to) "traditional" advertising isn't really any better. The difference is that they can't track it and so they've been fooled into believing that it works better than it does. Hope may be on the way, however. It will take time, but I think that once TiVo (or similar) devices become commonplace, companies will start to get a more accurate look at how many people watch or care about their ads. Of course, TiVo stacks the deck against them further, thanks to the ability for people to fast forward through all advertising now.

Scott

[johncj]

The lack of attention to quality of content is the not a mere oversight in this article. It's why this article is fundamentally wrong on so many levels. Shirky misunderstands writing, publishing, and human nature at a very deep level. When he writes "We want a world where global publishing is effortless..", he is just flat out wrong. We don't want that. Bad writing devalues written content the same way counterfeit currency destroys an economy. Nobody has time to wade through everybody else's laundry list to find good writing. What he calls filtering has far more value than he understands. The ability to write coherently and engagingly has been a much higher barrier to entry to publishing than anything else for at least the last 500 years. The Internet hasn't and won't change that.

I come to this site several times a day because it saves me time. You guys do a great job of covering developments in the Pocket PC world. The filtering efforts of the small team is far more interesting and engaging than Jason Dunn's blog would ever be. The business model that needs to be figured out is how to do Content Aggregation on the web, the way the other media have figured it out (each model is different).

[Jason Dunn]

I come to this site several times a day because it saves me time. You guys do a great job of covering developments in the Pocket PC world. The filtering efforts of the small team is far more interesting and engaging than Jason Dunn's blog would ever be.

Since you seem to have this all figured out :roll: I won't argue with your other points (though I disagree with most of them), but in point of fact this site started out as exactly that: a Blog, run ony by me, that covered Pocket PC issues. It still has many Blog-ish tones (go and compare our news posts to Brighthand), and I have no intention of changing that.

You underestimate and misunderstand that nature of the Blog revolution.

[johncj]

No, Jason, you just proved my point (even if you don't realize it). Quality attracts quality. It started out as a Blog. It evolved into something much better. Explain the Blog revolution to me. Where is the impact? I see a mish-mash of self-involved circular references that doesn't matter to anybody except the participants. You see all sorts of people talking about the importance of the Blogosphere, but what is it that's important? How is it different from every other self-publishing trend throughout history, except that the bloggers can be ignored by millions more people who have access to their writing? How is it better/different/more important than, oh say, Usenet? Or, public access cable tv? Or, letters to the editors? Or, vanity novels? Just pick one of those things and tell why blogging is different. All of these things have the same basic ingredients that Shirky identifies for blogs (for a large number of people they were cheap, there are no filters, etc.). I would argue that none of them are particularly important and didn't have any substantial impact on the publishing industry. How is blogging different?

[Jason Dunn]

I should first express that I haven't read Clay's article yet - it's in my Inbox. :-)

I've always viewed the Blogging revolution as being as much about the METHOD as the MADNESS. :-) Blogging tools, by definition, separate the FORM from the CONTENT. Blogging tools focus on allowing the creation of content in a simple fashion, without worrying about the FORM (the HTML). Blogger was the first tool I ever used that allowed me to create a Web site and start publishing

I do agree that the vast majority of Blogs are vanity pages, but when I compare the vanity pagees we have today with the vanity pages we had from the circa 1999 Geocities era, I can't help but see a significant difference between the two. Blogging brought CMS (content management systems) down to the level of mere mortals like myself, and THAT is the most revolutionary element of Blogging.

Ultimately the separation of form and content will continue to evolve and the concept of a Blog will all but disappear. But the thing it gave us was very precious indeed...