Remember the elevator scene towards the end of the movie Working Girl? Melanie Griffith quickly describes how she comes up with the idea for Trask Radio by putting together seemingly unrelated bits of information from different sources, including Page Six of the New York Post. Which is just what happens in the blogosphere in real-time.
Until January of this year I hadn’t paid much attention to blogs. What got me hooked was the wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl half-time show. The FCC jumped into action, not only investigating CBS, but also intensifying their concern with shock jocks like Howard Stern. While the mainstream press covered the Janet Jackson episode as you would expect, the coverage of the implications were dramatically better covered by a handful of blogs and the comments within. Jeff Jarvis’s blog, www.buzzmachine.com, was completely tuned in and was well ahead of the mainstream press. Very early on Jeff had connected Janet Jackson and the FCC to Howard Stern moving to satellite radio.
Clearly, you can’t believe everything you read or hear – blogs, magazines, newspapers, TV, radio – whatever the source. But there is tremendous domain expertise in the blogoshere and those who do not pay attention to bloggers in their domain are ignoring invaluable perspective.
That point has not been lost on me either Steve. A couple of months ago, a good friend got me to start looking at what was happening in the blogosphere. Here I used to just think that it was a bunch of people no one really cared about writing their diaries online. Well, it's much much more than that. Good recent examples to go w/the one you've provided are both the "Rathergate" issue which was completely driven through the blogosphere. The other was the breaking story on the new Kryptonite lock which could be easily picked using a BIC pen. Both of these stories really put a unique perspective on the power of enthusiasts who have passions they take very seriously.
Bloggers are becoming the equivalent of those cryptographers and security buffs who spend all their time trying to crack codes to demonstrate the weakness or to prove the strength of the released algorythms. Now this type of activity is taking place in nearly every subject area. We may finally have found a way to put "truth in advertising" to the test.
Imagine a detergent claiming to be better than another (though this might actually be true). All of a sudden, this fact and challenges to those claims may appear on some housewive's blog. Whoa! Even if the claim isn't completely refuted, now there's a medium in which to challenge the claims and put them to the test of public opinion, the opinion of *actual* users. Hell, Bill Gross' (of ideaLab fame) newly released search engine, Snap, already made some changes on the basis of what bloggers (real life users) wrote.
I believe this sort of thing will begin to occur in all industries, and frankly, given the low level of trust in our country lately, due to uncovered corporate and gov't fraud, there's an impetus to leverage the blogosphere to reinstate some level of oversight on what people and companies say. Our oversight institutions are not doing a very fine job of it, so the *people* are taking it upon themselves to take control of the situation in their respective areas of interest and expertise. At least, that's what it seems like.
Posted by: Pierre | October 07, 2004 at 06:53 PM