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Thoughtful debate

There’s a very thoughtful debate between Scot Hacker and Sean Graham about the significance of weblogs. My horribly reductive summary: Graham says, what’s the big deal? Weblogs are not significantly different from other forms of media. Hacker argues that actually, there’s a lot that’s new:

  • “Self-publishing has never been this easy.
  • The editorial/filtering role is now in the hands of every person (in a way that it wasn’t two years ago).
  • RSS has moved the newswire feed from a push model to a pull model, and everyone can now have their own news feed.
  • Blogs are so popular that old media is concerned about the eyeballs moving away from centralized media companies and out into the field.
  • A journal was almost always a private thing. Now the concept of the public journal, with links, is an established part of the landscape.
  • Two years ago the phenomenon (you yourself describe it as a phenomenon) didn’t exist – now it does. Clearly something is different from the same old shit.”

This is a serious, thoughtful discussion that covers a lot of ground (including the tired “journalists-vs-bloggers” debate) with careful argument and insight.

BTW, Hacker has moved his weblog to an MT based system running at his old site, the birdhouse.

1 Comment

  1. Dylan Tweney

    Did I forget to mention that Scot’s weblog rocks? ( http://www.birdhouse.org/blog/ ) It does. I’ve been a birdhouse fan since way back and I’m glad to see the URL back in action.

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