An interesting spat developed over the last few days in Nashville that bears comment. It involves WKRN-TV and the bloggers who run their aggregator sites, Nashville is Talking and Volunteer Voters.

VV is an aggregator of the political blogosphere in Tennessee and has grown to become a very influential voice in state politics. It’s written by A.C. Kleinheider, a very smart young man who lives and breathes politics and has a fairly comprehensive understanding of the way things work in the state (Nashville is the state capital).

On Tuesday, he wrote a thoughtful but controversial piece about the extremes to which certain elements in our culture have gone to portray our service men and women as saints. Over at NiT, Brittney Gilbert saw it as a noteworthy entry in the local blogosphere and mentioned it and her support of Kleinheider’s argument.

This didn’t sit well with right-wing talk show host Steve Gill, who basically called both A.C. and Brittney unpatriotic communists. Gill told his listeners to call the station and protest. A war of online words ensued, which led to a story in the Nashville City Paper.

This is a fascinating event, because it strikes at the heart of the conflict between Big J journalism and the personal media revolution. These two people are employed by the station but function in the world of Media 2.0, where the rules are vastly different. Gill wants (needs) for the station to play by the Media 1.0 rules, for that is precisely what the political PR world knows how to manipulate. He’s appealing to “the rules” to place his perspective front-and-center.

The two websites carry disclaimers, which ought to be enough for intelligent people to recognize. Not only do Brittney and A.C. have a right to their arguments, this whole notion that journalists are somehow separate from their own selves is an illusion that the web is shining its light on every day. Moreover, these two sites are aggregators and serve a tremendous public service by observing what’s being said in the local (and state political) blogosphere. They would be irrelevant sites if they didn’t engage the local bloggers at the same time. Both regularly comment on other people’s blogs as well, and this is as it should be.

This particular event is all about a right wing talk show host trying to get publicity, which is exactly what’s happening. What’s most interesting to me — and ought to be of interest to everybody — is the general reaction of the blogosphere itself. That’s where this issue was born and that’s where it belongs.

The conversation that is news can be a messy business, especially where it’s up-close and personal like it is in the immediate world of the blogosphere. Issues are discussed here in a way that’s not codified and neat, and frankly, I think that’s incredibly healthy for our culture. This particular matter is going to get even messier as the 2008 elections approach. The question is will media companies have the spine to engage it this way or will they cling to the safe harbor of same-o, same-o?

NOTE: In the minds of the right, anybody who doesn’t follow certain positions is on the left. This is hogwash, but it has served conservatism well for almost three decades in the U.S. As E.P. of The 700 Club in the early 80s, I helped create this meme, and I think it’s time it was put to bed.

(Disclosure: WKRN-TV is a former client and I helped develop both of these aggregators)

I’m eastbound today en route Jackson, Mississippi for the first ever Central Mississippi Blogger Meet-up. The event will be held at the studios of WJTV-TV tomorrow morning at 11am. If you’re a blogger from the area, you should have already received an evite, and I hope to see you there.

This is a station that has made the decision to listen, and those of us who blog need to sit up and take notice when that happens. So come on by and say hello.

I’m also looking forward to spending a little time with my friend Linda Allen. She’s the main anchor there and was a dear friend of Allie’s.

Oops, some offensive language has slipped into my blog. What ever will I do?

Below is a screen grab of a piece in PCWorld by John Dunn of Techworld. It really does hack me off.

Blogs now infested with offensive content? A variety of unpleasant content, including porn, offensive language, hate posting, and malware? Give me a friggin’ break!

The truth is the story doesn’t justify the headline, but we all know that the headline is what sells the story. Its about Scansafe’s Monthly Global Threat Report for March 2007, from which a few juicy quotes were lifted. Up to 80% of the web’s blogs, for example, contain some form of offensive content, according to Scansafe. Of course, to make the list, the company had to pick up just ONE word considered profanity in order to broadbrush the site as “offensive.”

My problem with this is Dunn’s headline and sub-head, which will enter the language of those who already believe blogs to be a blight on our culture.

And so it goes…

Do yourself a favor and go read the reaction by Jeff Jarvis to the New York Times’ attempt to boost Tim O’Reilly for his proposed “rules” for bloggers. It’s a spot-on analysis that I won’t attempt to reproduce with my own words.

In a nutshell, O’Reilly wants the blogosphere to behave, and Jeff rightly calls this dangerous.

This effort misses the point of the internet, blogs, and even of civilized behavior. They treat the blogosphere as if it were a school library where someone — they’ll do us the favor — can maintain order and control. They treat it as a medium for media. But as Doc Searls has taught me, it’s not. It’s a place. And when I moved into the place that is my town, I didn’t put up a badge on my fence saying that I’d be a good neighbor (and thus anyone without that badge is, de facto, a bad neighbor). I didn’t have to pledge to act civilized. I just do. And if I don’t, you can judge me accordingly. Are there rules and laws? Yes, the same ones that exist in worlds physical or virtual: If I libel or defame you on the streetcorner or in a paper or on a screen, the recourse is the same. But I don’t put up another badge on my fence saying I won’t libel you. I just don’t. That’s how the world works. Why should this new world work any differently? Why should it operate with more controls and more controllers?

The New York Times, of course, promotes the idea, because they would be well-served with a blogosphere that was forced to play by their rules.

Here’s the thing about blogs that most big-time media observers miss: while there are a few who rise to mainstream audience levels, the vast majority of blogs are just personal observations about this or that. If you don’t know that, you’ve never been to MySpace, and you certainly don’t have a MySpace account. Every MySpace user has a blog, and you’d be amazed at the number of people there who make entries. We’re going to give these people a set of behavior rules?

You see, this is all about big media’s obsession with the need to control what they view as a media threat. It may be a threat, but as Jeff and Doc note, the web is a place, and we don’t need artificial special rules to bring it in line with institutional life.

Blogging continues to grow, but the growth has slowed over the last year. The aggregate number of posts from all blogs is beginning to slow, too. These facts are according to Dave Sifry’s latest “State of the Live Web” report from Technorati, and it’s filled with fascinating stuff. Most notable is the title of the report — expanding from the “State of the Blogosphere,” which has been Dave’s traditional, twice-annual report — to the “State of the Live Web.” This is a good move, I think, because it helps re-position Technorati.

The Static Web is what Google searches. The Live Web is what Technorati searches. Fascinating.

The blogosphere is very much a “live” organism, so it belongs in the “Live Web.” And I like this term far, far better than the VC-generated “Web 2.0.”

Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more.

What makes this possible is the rise in the use of tags across all forms of social media and the increasing implementation of tags by the publishing platforms supporting each form of media. Increasingly, tags have become a lingua franca of Live Web, helping to categorize social media while also indicating where people’s attention might be at any given moment. But because each form of media is published from unique platforms with their own established communities, the audience found itself hopping from platform to platform to get a sense of what might be hot at any given moment. Which is why our social media aggregation service — made manifest on our tagged media pages — is growing at a torrid pace.

Click to embiggen

There’s an important tidbit for mainstream media observers as well: the number of blogs in Sifry’s “Top 100″ most popular sites rose substantially during the period of this measurement (4th Qtr, 2006). Technorati views the popularity of blogs through inbound links, so it’s really a measure of authority.

During Q3 2006 there were only 12 blogs in the Top 100 most popular sites.

In Q4, however, there were 22 blogs on the list — further evidence of the continuing maturation of the Blogosphere. Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets. For instance, information not shown in our data but revealed in our own user testing in Q1 2007 indicates that the audience is less and less likely to distinguish a blog from, say, nytimes.com — for a growing base of users, these are all sites for news, information, entertainment, gossip, etc. and not a “blog” or a “MSM site”.

Here are some of the facts, thanks to Doc Searls:

70 million weblogs
About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or…
1.4 new blogs every second
3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December (see here)
1.5 million posts per day, or…
17 posts per second
Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
English second at 33%
Chinese third at 8%
Italian fourth at 3%
Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
English the most even in postings around-the-clock
Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
2.5 million blogs used at least one tagged post in February

Ten years ago today, Dave Winer started his blog and, in so doing, launched what is now known as the blogosphere. He’s brought back the content from that first day.

There are arguments that others were blogging before Dave Winer, but it was Dave’s enthusiasm, talents and gifts that moved the rock (just like Podcasting). He has been instrumental in helping many others launch their blogs, including yours truly and this one.

Congratulations, Dave. You’re a true pioneer.

Alex Rowland doesn’t blog as much as he used to (or should — take that, Alex), but when he does, it’s usually a worthwhile read. This morning he writes about the vanity of sharing your life online, or is it more than that?

Many do these things for fame and self-aggrandizement, but I think the reason for most share their lives is that the simple act of sharing information for most humans is a very pleasant activity.

I think this is an evolutional trait of human beings. We are genetically programmed to enjoy the process of passing along experience and information to others. The web has just enabled this to become a much larger part of many people’s lives. It’s magnified the pleasure of sharing because you can share with so many people at the same time. It’s more subtle and less sinister than fame, but actually more powerful.

It gives me great hope for the future of our emerging civilization.

Me too, Alex. Me too.

At WKRN-TV in Nashville, just about everybody blogs, including morning anchor Heather Orne and her husband, Prime Time anchor Neil Orne. Neil was one of the first bloggers at the station, and Heather joined him just a few months later.

Heather is nine months pregnant, and they’ve been using their blogs to let viewers in on the progress of her pregnancy. Page views, as you can imagine, have skyrocketed.

On Wednesday, Heather was involved in a little fender bender, and it scared the crap out of everybody, including the driver of the other car. You see, he’s a fan and has been following Heather’s condition.

Neil posted a picture of the two cars stuck together. Here is Heather’s blog.

Do yourself a favor and read the comments. Then ask yourself why your anchors aren’t blogging.

Here is the latest in my ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World.

This picture was taken last week during a visit to the National Press Club in Washington. I was there to meet some great people and make a presentation, but I got the chance to walk around, look at all the marvelous photographs and try and absorb the history of the place.

The Press Club represents the essence of all that professional journalists hold dear. Bathed in the lives and deaths of those who went before, it is a lasting testimony to an institution that finds itself facing significant internal and external pressures today.

On the way home, I began writing this essay, Voyeurism: Journalism’s 21st Century Crisis. As always, I make no claim to special insight or knowledge. This vision is simply my thoughts about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we might be headed. The way I look at it, it’s all there for anybody to see, but the price of a pair of glasses is a willingness to be honest with ourselves.

The people I was with in Washington agreed with me that this is perhaps the most exciting era in the history of communications, but that traditional media companies must “drive their car and fix it at the same time.” That is a significant challenge, and a how-to manual would certainly help. Unfortunately, we’ve got to make a lot of it up as we go along, and our ties to our assumptions, traditions and history might just be a net liability.

Rosenblumtv

The writer is Michael Rosenblum, he of Video Journalist fame (or infamy). Michael is vilified by those who think he’s out to destroy television with his small cameras and “one-man-bands” (a pejorative term in television newsrooms). The loudest critics are video news photographers, that unique breed of adventurer that finds the “talent” aspects of the business to be otherworldly.

I’ve known Michael for many years, and I can tell you that he’s not out to destroy anything. His wish is just the opposite; he wants to save people’s jobs by altering the archaic status-quo of the traditional newsgathering process. I think he’s a genius and an innovator, but no one can argue that Michael Rosenblum is a storyteller. That comes out clearly in his blog.

From an entry called “Edward III, Crecy and Local TV Newsrooms,” Rosenblum tells the tale of how the use of new technology altered warfare in the time of Edward III of England. The battle was at Crecy, where the French army — made up of thousands of armored knights — met the king’s bowmen. He likens the strategy to that necessary for stations in the conversion to Video Journalists.

The French, in vastly superior numbers marched north to Crecy filled with over confidence. They looked out on the English forces and laughed. They would cut them to ribbons by lunchtime.

So the French army marched into battle with the English bowmen, on foot. The bowmen let loose their arrows - like rain.. and the French knights began to go down. The English were shooting the horses out from under the knights. This was against the rules! On the muddy ground, immobilized in their suits of armor, the knights were helpless as the English bowman set upon them and killed them on the spot. This was also considered unsporting behaviour. One was supposed, at worst, to ransome the nobleman.

The French army was decimated at Crecy, and later Edward repeated the trick at Poitiers. It was, in a moment, the end of knights, armor, chivalry and medieval warfare. A thousand years of history vanished in an afternoon.

What brought down the French army was first and foremost the technology of the long bow. But more than that, it was the pure foresight and courage of Edward to completely embrace the new technology and understand how to implement it. He could have just added a few bowmen to his army of knights (just as newsrooms could add a few VJs to their conventional reporters and cameramen). Neither does the trick. Edward reinvented warfare from the ground up based on the light, simple and portable technology of the long bow. It was an incredibly brave thing to do.

Michael’s been diligent to keep quality entries coming since he launched his blog last week. I hope he keeps it up. We need his experience and his voice.

There are certain similarities about all bloggers, regardless of the community in which I find them. In Raleigh, WNCN-TV hosted its first blogger meetup Monday, and I’m happy to report that these bloggers, like those in San Francisco, Nashville, Greensboro and elsewhere, are fun folks to be around. The Raleigh bunch are bright, extremely media-savvy people who are easy to talk with and eager to be helpful.

This is often a real surprise to some traditional news people, who expect them to be (I guess) a bunch of angry and hostile guys in their pajamas. Their knowledge of the local media scene was remarkable. Who knew?

Raleigh is a part of the Research Triangle, so there are a lot of tech blogs in the area. Andy Beal, for example, calls Raleigh home, as do Wayne Sutton, Marcus Williford and Nathan Gilliatt. Stephanie is launching a blog with an upbeat tone. Rob does career help. Then there are Luther, Zoe, Chuck, Jason and Matt. Some of them showed up with ideas about possibly doing business with the station, but for the most part, it was just curious bloggers being themselves.

There were a couple of good takeaways for me. I expected them to want embeddable (is that a word) videos from the station, but I was surprised by the request for trackbacks on station stories. It makes sense, though. A lot of stations are making comments available, but I can’t think of anybody who allows trackbacks.

The station is off to a good start, because they’ve agreed to listen. They’re already planning the next meet-up, a more social-like event that will be held at a time when more bloggers can make it. I hope they’ll invite me again.

WNCN-TV in Raleigh is hosting its first blogger meet-up on Monday at noon at the station. I’m going to be there, so drop on by and say hello. I’d love to get to know you.

Lunch is being served, and attendees will get a cool, collectible and highly coveted NBC17 coffee mug AND a t-shirt. How about that for swag?

Here’s the Evite, in case you didn’t get one.

This is the start of what we hope will be a highly supportive effort by the station on behalf of the local blogosphere, and I sure hope we get a nice turnout. There aren’t a lot of local media companies willing to do it right, so I want to extend a personal invitation to Triangle area bloggers to come out a meet a group that is.

In a case that has ramifications for all media in the digital space, a federal judge in Austin, TX has dismissed a $30 million lawsuit against MySpace over the sexual assault of a 14-year old girl. The girl, who listed her age as 18 on her MySpace profile, was first contacted by her assailant on the site. The suit charged MySpace with negligence, gross negligence, fraud and negligent misrepresentation.

The judge cited the Communications Decency Act of 1996 in dismissing the negligence and gross negligence charges, something we all need to consider. The CDA is increasingly providing safe haven for web businesses, because it protects them against messages people send to each other via a site. This includes comments on blogs, for example.

This is important, because liability is one of the key factors in broadcasting’s slow entry into the more vibrant, interactive paths of Media 2.0. What this ruling says, in part, is that MySpace should be given the same protection as any common carrier, such as a telephone company. If, for example, a sexual assault victim made contact with his or her assailant via telephone, the phone company would not be liable for damages in any case. Providing the vehicle for interaction does not automatically put that vehicle in our legal system’s bullseye.

But lawyers make their living in other people’s (deep) pockets, and case law is their drug of choice. Nobody knows that better than media companies, so I don’t blame anybody for being cautious. Judge Sam Sparks wrote, “If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace.” As a parent of children who use MySpace, I couldn’t agree with that more.

“This is allowing sites like MySpace to avoid the responsibility to make the Internet safe for children,” Jason Itkin, the lawyer in the case, said. “MySpace knows its Web site is a playground for sexual predators. Because of that, MySpace should be doing some very basic safety precautions.” This kind of inflammatory rhetoric is stock-in-trade and plays off fundamental fears that many people have about the wild west nature of the web. As I’ve written before, however, two-thirds of the users of MySpace keep their profiles “private,” which puts the “stalking” red herring into perspective.

The Wall Street Journal’s legal blog also points out that the head of security for MySpace, Hemanshu Nigam, is not the kind of guy who would take threats lightly.

Nigam joined MySpace after four years at Microsoft, where he was responsible for criminal compliance, security, and law enforcement affairs. Prior to joining Microsoft, the BU Law grad headed up the Motion Picture Association of America’s enforcement arm, and before that was a prosecutor for both the DOJ’s Criminal Division and the L.A. County DA’s Office.

The lawyer in the Austin case plans an appeal, and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. There are similar lawsuits against MySpace in California.

Proceed with caution, but do proceed.

(Here’s the ruling, thanks to Howard Bashman’s unique aggregator)

The controversy over past rantings of two bloggers hired by the Edwards campaign has been interesting to watch. I won’t argue the merits of either side of the matter; I simply wish to make an observation.

Is there a better illustration of the differences between the IRL (In Real Life, for the uneducated) and URL worlds than this? The inflammatory statements written by these bloggers weren’t questioned in the least when they were first written. Why? Well, that’s just the way of the blogosphere. Anything goes here.

Sacred cows (especially those political) are mercilessly assaulted — and often in language that would embarrass a sailor — every minute of every day in the blogosphere, and nobody thinks anything about it. Caveat emptor. I find it refreshing, for I’d much rather know everything about the person I’m reading than to have it hidden by “cultural norms” or an institutional byline.

Not so “in real life,” where political correctness — with its rules of propriety and rightness — governs speech (it stopped being free a long time ago, BTW). In the real world, biases are withheld and hidden, as if they don’t exist or at least aren’t allowed to exist. Unfortunately, they do, and the best we have is that we don’t talk about them.

Human nature doesn’t stop being human nature just because the guy across from you wants to see a smile. Who’s the bigger threat to culture, the one who speaks what’s on her mind or the one who hides what she really thinks?

So writers who work in a space where they’re free to speak their minds are dragged into the world where speaking your mind is punished, and we’re surprised by this?

I’ve written a thousand times that the core disruption we’re all facing is cultural, not technological, and this event is just another chapter in that story.

To me, it’s not so much a case of “be careful what you say online” as it is a case of matter coming into contact with anti-matter. And anybody who’s ever watched Star Trek knows where that leads.

Jeff Jarvis gives props to WKRN-TV this morning in a post about the New York blogosphere.

Following in the footsteps of WKRN in Nashville, WNBC in New York plays host to a meetup with local bloggers and Sree Sreenivasan — who just moved over from WABC to head a new technology push — talked about it at length on the air this morning.

The station covered the event (which they should have) and offered viewers a pretty interesting survey that you can take it yourself.

New York’s first Blogger Summit was held in Studio 6A at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, known to many as the home of the Conan O’Brien Show. There, WNBC and the team of bloggers spent time talking about covering New York, its many niches, and the role “new media” plays in a world previously dominated by networks and newspapers.

The hope is that those bloggers will work with WNBC.com, trading news and information and giving additional exposure to big stories, both on blogs or on TV.

For example, if a blog gets a scoop on a big news story, WNBC would work with that blogger to report that story on television, giving more exposure to that blog. Also, if WNBC has video of a news event that might be interesting to a blogger, the blogger will have our blessing to post that video on their site.

I’m not sure I’d have positioned it exactly that way, but the station obviously felt it was the right path. Organizing the blogosphere isn’t so much about exploitation getting them to work with the station; it’s about the conversation and how supporting the conversation comes with a significant pay-back for the station. This is what WKRN has learned, and along the way, they’ve come to the exact position that WNBC is seeking.

This comes just a few weeks after The Washington Post announced plans for a blog directory and group blog (a “blortal”), Metroblogging DC. This, too, began with another meetup of bloggers. One of the bloggers involved in the group blog is David, who wrote with typical blogger skepticism in his inaugural post:

Generally, this is a good step from a media company the size and clout of the Washington Post, and seemingly, given their interest in feedback from the community of the bloggers, they are looking for a ‘best of breed’ directory when they launch (whenever that may be). It’s ambitious, but, it could be, a solution to a problem that doesn’t necessarily exist at this point, which is, the inability of the public to find relevant information on blogs in the DC Metro Area (regardless of content or focus). Advertising, however localized, is probably the major corporate reason for this push since, it’s been reported widely around the country, that the web (and sites such as Craigslist) are eating into a lot of the traditional revenue such as classifieds and smaller ads that newspapers usually rely upon. This is not to say the presentation of this upcoming site feature was disingenuous, but the reasons for even presenting this to the folks gathered was never fully disclosed.

I think it’s fabulous that local media companies are reaching out to the blogosphere, because the involvement with the local community will only make them better at what they do. We called WKRN’s aggregator “Nashville is Talking,” because the real mission of the station is to listen.

And that’s something we generally don’t do very well.

From my friend Tish Grier this morning comes an e-mail with news that GMA-7, the Philippines’ number one television network, has launched a network of blogs via their Website, gmanews.tv. Editor-in-Chief Malou Mangahas has a blog and, while her English is a little jumbled, writes of the company’s decision to get into “professional” blogging. Her thoughts are not only eloquent but spot on.

We will, on the Web, on television, on radio, on print, according to journalism’s time-honored standards of accuracy (get it right), fairness and balance (get all sides). We will, with all due respect to, and admiration for, probloggers.

Yes, in the beginning, blogs were conceived to be personal sites. Vanity sites sometimes. Blogs challenged a few tenets of journalism that in the beginning, the biggest and best media agencies of the world took the path of caution.

In time, however, these media agencies and the most creditable journalism institutes realized that the blogosphere is a platform too important for media to ignore. In time, their blog sites rolled in a series, and we are all the better informed for this.

There are bloggers and there are journalists and… ne’er the twain shall meet? On the Web, the twain have met, crossed, and now run on parallel tracks many times over.

The written word unites us, and write we must all, for our readers.

I’m not sure that traditional mainstreamers in the U.S. have closed the gap quite as completely as Ms. Mangahas appears to have, but it sure is refreshing to find this kind of thinking anywhere it appears. Here, it’s very much a case-by-case deal, but more and more newspapers, television and radio stations do appear to be getting into the world of the blog.

“The written word unites us, and write we must all…” How terribly satisfying it is for an old blogger like myself to read such a line from a leader in mainstream journalism — and now blogger — such as Ms. Mangahas.

(thanks, Tish)

Readers here won’t be surprised by this, but Frank Barnako at Marketwatch is reporting that the blogging strategy of top newspapers is having a pretty significant impact on overall web traffic.

The number of visitors to the blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew 210% in the past year, far outpacing growth to the parent sites. Nielsen/NetRatings found that while the unique audience to online newspapers grew 9% from December 2005 to December 2006, the number of visitors to blog pages at the top newspapers skyrocketed and accounted for 13% of the parent sites’ total traffic.

At WKRN-TV, there are weeks when the 23 blogs outperform the mother site in all metrics, and I just wonder why it has taken these other folks so long to figure out that this is smart business.

But beyond all that, there are significant reasons why these types of “publications” are having an impact:

• They’re written in conversational English.
• They contain argument — the element missing in contemporary journalism thanks to the “cleansing” of that bogus standard known as objectivity.
• They offer transparency about the writer, which leads to trust.

But the greatest benefit of all about this kind of strategy is that it moves the creation of web content into the hands of the people who are paid to create content and away from a staff of re-writers, regardless of how talented they may be. That, more than anything else, makes this strategy one of enormous value.

I am really not a “told you so” kind of person, but the news that Backfence is having difficulty comes as no surprise. For the unenlightened, Backfence is a series of 13 “citizen journalism” sites in three metropolitan areas: Washington, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. Funded by VC money, the model was touted by some observers as the way of the future.

Its downfall — if that’s what’s happening — should not be an indictment of hyperlocal citizens media, because there are plenty of other sites that are doing well (Baristanet, SunValleyOnline, Buffalo Rising, H2Otown, and one of my favorites, PegasusNews here in Dallas). It’s a tricky proposition, to say the least, but I think efforts that don’t do well have difficulty, because they’re trying too hard to build something that’s already there. Aggregation is the key, not content creation.

This is why we built Nashville is Talking for WRKN-TV. It is an aggregator of the existing blogosphere and doesn’t try to be anything other than that. The community that has built up around it is pretty amazing, a little society that runs itself quite nicely and brings loads of benefits to the TV station along-the-way. WKRN’s plans go beyond what currently exists, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when all is said and done.

The existing blogosphere in any community has energy and life that can’t be duplicated by efforts from without. Bloggers write, because they have something to say. And people who have something to say will find a way to say it. What I don’t like about some citizen media sites is how hard they try to create a forum for people via their own model, reasoning that once the forum is in place, talented people will flock to it. People who have something to say already have their own forums, so efforts to duplicate this, I believe, come off as dry and lifeless.

Fred Wilson has a good summary of the “placeblogging” (this is the new term) phenomenon in his blog this week.

Like other observers, I’ve supported Backfence and the people who were trying to make it work. Nobody has a lock on where all this is going, and we’ve got to accept that some things will work and others won’t. Part of that, I think, is deciding what we mean by “works” and then building accordingly.

Media 2.0 is not Media 1.0, and the more we try to make it so, the quicker we’ll go down in flames.

Rather than dismissing Joseph Rago’s rant The Blog Mob, “Written by fools to be read by imbeciles”, I think we ought to pay close attention to what he says. Rago is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal and a writer who likes to use big words (a sesquipedalian, eh?). When I first read of his commentary, I was incensed that such a man would resort to name-calling in ranting against bloggers, but I’ve come away with a very different opinion after reading his piece.

This is why we should always follow the links, but that’s another essay.

I don’t doubt there is condescension in his opinion piece, but his reference is mostly to political blogs, and I’m quite in agreement with him that many of these tend to noise.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

He’s right in that there exists in the blogosphere no serious criticism of the blogosphere, at least not that I’ve been able to discover. This in and of itself ought to give us pause. I think his broadbrush treatment of bloggers, however, is idiotic and self-serving and evidence of his own pronouncements for political blogs — that because this type of writing is predictable, it is “excruciatingly boring.”

I also don’t care for his belief that “journalism requires journalists,” for it suggests that only the educated elite qualify for such a title.

But there’s more, and this is why I think it’s so important to “hear” what Rago is saying:

Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.

Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.

I concur that without checks and balances, we are certainly passing a form of decay off as progress, but any serious blogger knows that his or her audience provides a kind of check and balance that institutional journalism doesn’t know. Take a look, for instance, at the comment by Tom Tucker on my entry below about illegally sold DVDs in Amman. This is my editor, if you will, and I can understand why Rago would be concerned about this with political writers, because they may be more inclined to dismiss criticism that I am.

Like any of its modern equivalents, postmodern institutions will have to also find balance between opposing views, but this will be increasingly the role of an informed citizenry and not that of the few who work for the institutional press. By increasingly rejecting the mainstream media (through viewership and reader declines), this check and balance system is already underway.