Lisa posted this link the other day - Elmer at Teknoids: “In case you hadn’t noticed, the OPML Editor is becoming an open source version of Radio”. Indeed, I was screwing around the other week trying to produce a hacky alternative to the code that Dave is going to be releasing soon to mirror OPML blogs. That’s a project I can strike from my list of things to do.
Tomorrow I might register some dot-com domain names. I’m probably going to use GoDaddy - they’re cheaper than most of the UK registrars and they’ve been drummed in to me by PodShow (although Steve Gillmor’s six-minute ad waffles didn’t do it, that’s for sure). My only problem with GoDaddy is that their site is very tough to navigate. What am I going to register? Well, that would be telling. I may register the domain for a startup idea I have, and I probably will register the domain for a new home for my blog and all the various OPML trimmings that I’ve been working on and thinking about. You’re going to love the name of that, although certain busybodies may possibly disapprove.
Rachel has got an interesting Podshow-related link. It’s to a site called btpodshow.com. Go. Look. It’s the future of media, supposedly.
Emninent Domain Watch blog.
I see that John Reid is keeping up the tradition of being even more authoritarian than one’s predecessor. What would the Home Office do without that beautiful tradition?
Snipperoo has got themselves a brand new office in one of the salubrious parts of Brighton.
Denial tactics
These reports don’t get it. Nobody claimed that blogs are used mostly for journalism - citizen or otherwise. Nobody is claiming either that the vast majority of camera phones are going to be used for the purpose of photographing terrorist attacks or politicians getting roughed up by drunken hobos. The point is that those tools are now in people’s hands, and they are learning how to use them. It’s a mind shift. If you ask my grandparents what they think of the idea of “citizen media”, they’d absolutely not understand it. The people who are currently writing LiveJournals and MySpace blogs may be posting nothing of any interest. But that doesn’t mean that blogs aren’t going to change how journalism is practiced. If my grandma got mugged on the street, she’d call the police. If I got mugged, I’d call the police and be able to tell a big audience about it.
What blogs are doing is demythologising the practice of journalism. Bloggers are starting to realise what the value proposition is for journalism, and cashing in on it.
The people who photographed and filmed the Tube attacks, and who blogged about it last year, may have never posted anything that resembles journalism before that. They may have only used their camera phone for taking pictures of their mates at the pub.
At the moment, blogs are not making a difference quantitatively. They are changing how we view the role of media around us. They are helping to destroy the idea that the media is somehow a “view from nowhere”. An example? Well, we don’t rewrite press releases out here in Blogland. If someone says something interesting, we point people to it, write something snarky in the link text and let people read the original source material.
We’ve been through this before. The printing press, remember? The printing press brought us the Reformation and Mills & Boon novels. Nobody dismisses the huge change that printing has had because it has also allowed lots (perhaps a majority) of not-quite-so life changing things to accompany it.
Steve Rubel: “This means that the smaller universe of bloggers who do break and/or comment on news will bear the brunt of pitches from the public relations community”. Eeek! Community?! This Community will be pitching us!
I shall not make any remarks about this story. It’s just brimming with possibility which I shall leave you to think about.
