racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

An opposing view indeed. Shel Israel of Naked Conversations posts an interview with Rich Levin, friend and erstwhile colleague of blogging evangelists Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel.

Main points quoted:

• There will be the “top tier” blogs, with small but influential vertical audiences.  The rest (80%) will suck.
• Bloggers talk about becoming more like journalists, but they will never
  be journalists until they conduct their reporting using the same
  unvarnished methods as the greats.
• Most
  blogs are nothing more than utterly boring personal diaries. 
  Those which aren’t poorly written, wholly unedited cures for insomnia
  are, increasingly, driven by public relations and marketing teams.
• The initial beauty of blogging — the notion of truly personal
  publishing — is now becoming corrupted, thanks to legions of marketers
  discovering blogs.
• Blogs
  are just another medium which any serious communicator should leverage
  to reach people …  Every person likes to get his or her news and
  information differently.
• The Internet will also consume all other forms of mass communications.
• I do see publishers using RSS as one of many ways to syndicate their content and reach the public.

Simply put, for Mr. Levin, the medium is not the message.  Blogs
are yet another medium by which content is delivered, and we should put
emphasis on the quality of this content, and not the vessel through
which it is carried.  I agree with this point by Mr. Levin (though
not with everything he said).

It’s the content that matters.

Pretty soon, we will see content providers (mainstream media, bloggers,
news sources) taking advantage of the new trends in distribution such
as RSS, and other digital transmission forms.

Being a blogger, this puts much pressure on me to make sure my content
is worth reading.  Somehow, that’s antithetical to the essence of
blogging (i.e. the roots being personal online journals), but in line
with the evolutionary nature of online content transmission mechanisms.

As aptly indicated by a comment-poster, Steven Streight, “blogs are the democratization of web content … being the first universal publishing system in history, a medium open
to any human being with a computer and internet access, open to the
average person.”  Bloggers should, hence, work hard (and smart) to keep it that way.

I’ll keep on blogging!

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