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Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about the danger of encountering predators in online portals. In particular, that faced by children. In that column, I added a heaping helping of castigation for the News Corp. owned portal, myspace.com.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about the danger of encountering predators in online portals. In particular, that faced by children. In that column, I added a heaping helping of castigation for the News Corp. owned portal, myspace.com.
On Monday, I received an email from Ami Neiberger-Miller, Special Projects Consultant of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children containing a press release about a national online public service campaign intended to make children and parents aware of how to move about safely online.
Ms. Neiberger-Miller's message also contained an announcement that News Corporation, the owner of myspace.com (and Fox Television) was getting involved in the effort. Big surprise there! When I read the announcement, two words popped into my head – DAMAGE CONTROL. Even so, I guess News Corp. is due some credit for finally acting, considering the numerous problems involving myspace.com over the past few months.
One of the things that makes writing for EUR so enjoyable is the freedom of expression that I enjoy as a writer in this space, which gets me to the subject of this week's article. Even though this site relies on the support of advertisers to generate revenue (subscribing to the EUR is free, the advertisers are paying the freight, so remember that the next time you slam EUR in the message boards), I have never been told to tone down anything I've said in this column in order to “cow tow” to advertisers. I pray that day will never come, but I am not sure how long the same will be true for many of the most popular blogs on the Internet.
Also on Monday (April 10, 2006), I read a story on the Reuters wire service that BlogBurst, a syndication service for bloggers has signed up a group of major U.S. newspapers as customers. According to the Reuters story, the group includes Gannett Co. Inc., Washington Post Co., San Francisco Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman and San Antonio Express. The Reuters story also accurately pointed out that this move marks a further blurring of the line dividing blogs from mainstream media. In reality, this development is not surprising, given the explosive growth in the number of blogs, and the effects that independent bloggers have had on mainstream news reporting over the past few years. Remember, it was only a couple of years ago that mainstream news reporters blamed bloggers for early election reports that showed John Kerry leading George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election, not to mention that for the first time, at both the Republican and Democratic Party conventions, some of the most popular bloggers were given full press credentials. Despite the fact that I am not a full-time journalist, I myself enjoy full press access at the Consumer Electronics Show because of this column.
The emergence of blogs (or weblogs, as they are more accurately known) has proven a disruptive influence because the technology for implementing a blog is relatively simple, and allows anyone to instantly publish their personal opinions to literally millions of people. It is the impact of blogs on journalism which makes podcasting so popular, because the same technology is used but instead of syndicating text, podcasts use audio and increasingly, video content. In the 1980's, Wes “Scoop” Nisker used to sign off his news broadcasts on San Francisco's KFOG radio with the tag line, “if you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own”. Thanks to the technology that enables blogging, you can do just that (without going to jail in the process).
It is precisely the freedom of independent expression available to bloggers that gives them leverage against the modern day editorializing that passes for mainstream journalism. As long as bloggers remain independent, bloggers are free to publish their opinions free from the ideological shackles of advertisers, or some corporate boardroom. Essentially, when bloggers allow their content to be syndicated by services such as BlogBurst, that independence will go away. Newspapers will not risk offending their advertisers by publishing content from blogs that either offends advertisers, or the political sensitivities of their subscribers.
In many ways, the move towards syndicated blogging eventually will lead to the same kind of marginalization of alternative perspectives that has happened to information in general thanks to the likes of Google, which uses popularity of information (amongst other things) as a metric to rank the relevance of information when displaying search results. Keep your eyes open folks, we are approaching a time when the popular opinion will become the only opinion. When that happens, the powers that be will have achieved a major goal – thought control.
Russell de Pina is a Principal for n2active, a technology consulting firm located in Houston, TX and Long Beach, CA. Russell can be reached by email at rdepina@n2active.com