This marks my 150th posting as a blogger.
From what I have seen in my first few months of blogging, the medium is interesting and I enjoy the challenge of trying to generate stimulating thoughts on a regular basis.
I find blogging to be an interesting transformation from newsletters; still, I don’t see blogs replacing mainstream media yet. With Technorati tracking more than 1.2M blogs and growing, there’s just too much filtration needed for the average reader.
Mark Evans writes about the challenge in defining who is a journalist – and he considerately mentions the challenge for conference organizers in deciding who gets free media access. Notwithstanding a US court ruling that some interpret to the contrary, I think it is possible to distinguish between the riff-raff and journalists.
Even top bloggers digress into items better suited for intimate diaries with frequent off-topic personal issues. That kind of writing may be fine for sites targeted for friends or family but seems to be a practice that will chase away non-voyeuristic subscribers.
How will readers find diverse, trustworthy sources of material worth reading? Blog ranking services are based on various measures of popularity, hardly a scientific measure. Massive blog rolls on some sites appear to be tactics simply to increase rankings for search engines.
Thoughtful analysis, and stories worth reading. That is what our choice of newspapers deliver, whether it is broadsheet or tabloid, daily, weekly or monthly.
Newspapers and magazines present a somewhat more authoritative voice, conforming to at least a modicum of journalistic ethics and with varying degrees of political bias to match the desires of their target audience. The traditional media have editors that help filter the journalists – in effect imposing responsibilities to justify their journalistic freedoms.
Until someone develops a Brita for bloggers, to paraphrase a line from Finding Forrester, I’ll continue to read the National Post and its kind for dinner and save the blogs for dessert.