Silent Revolution

There’s a lot of devel­op­ments going on in the online space but most of them, while poten­tially chang­ing the state of online busi­ness for years to come, have been fly­ing under the radar for most peo­ple. It is inter­est­ing to see that what some of us are wit­ness­ing is really the begin­ning of a silent rev­o­lu­tion, cur­rently under­way but far from the glare of most jour­nal­ists and of the gen­eral population.

An exam­ple of this is the weblog. While the more web-savvy par­tic­i­pants amongst us are very famil­iar with the con­cept, there seems to be a lack of under­stand­ing of what blogs are about. Most dis­miss them as diaries (which some blogs, like those hosted by Live­Jour­nal, truly are) but fail to real­ize that there is a lot more going on in the space.

I recently had a chance to dis­cuss emerg­ing trends in tech­nol­ogy with a num­ber of Inter­net exec­u­tives for large com­pa­nies and was very sur­prised to see how quickly the weblog phe­nom­e­non is being dis­missed. What I sus­pect is that this is largely the result of the com­plex­ity of weblog­land, an area that is hard to really clas­sify neatly in a few buzz­words. A world where Glenn Reynolds sits only a few clicks away from Mark Pil­grim or Alan Reiter is one that reflects only the diver­sity of opin­ions you can find in the web space, and the vari­ety of sub­jects that are covered.

I sus­pect that what we are wit­ness­ing is a very quiet rev­o­lu­tion in con­tent pub­lish­ing. For starters, most main­stream B2B pub­li­ca­tions are start­ing to loose ground to the web. The rea­son behind this is that infor­ma­tion is more widely avail­able in the only world, and at a much faster rate than in the print world. Fur­ther­more, the costs related to print­ing and ship­ping weekly pub­li­ca­tions are much higher than those of set­ting up web­sites, even con­sid­er­ing the high price of full con­tent man­age­ment solutions.

Mean­while, indi­vid­u­als with par­tic­u­lar knowl­edge of a field can set them­selves up online for a rel­a­tively small amount of money and start pro­duc­ing con­tent almost instantly. What is needed after that is some amount of per­sonal mar­ket­ing, which in itself is becom­ing much eas­ier with the rise of social net­work sites like Ryze and LinkedIn. The next step in this new for­mat for online pub­lish­ing will be a rev­enue model. Some peo­ple have already tried tak­ing dona­tion and, increas­ingly, com­pa­nies like Google are start­ing to aggre­gate adver­tis­ing across net­works of blogs. I sus­pect that, within the next five years, we prob­a­bly will start see­ing blogs appear as a new form of micro-publishing.

But what about the editors?

Of course, the dis­cus­sion of weblogs as jour­nal­ism inevitably leads to a dis­cus­sion of the role of edi­tors within the jour­nal­ism field as a whole. How­ever, the inter­est­ing thing hap­pen­ing in blog­land is that the edit­ing is actu­ally dis­trib­uted. To a large extend, ser­vices like Blogdex Day­pop, and Popdex are start­ing to serve as basic edi­tors in terms of automat­ing the infor­ma­tion on what story is seen as impor­tant across the web world. This level of automa­tion is sim­i­lar, in a way to that used by Google News and fills an impor­tant part of the editor’s job: set­ting the agenda. By aggre­gat­ing data across blog­land, those ser­vices use “blog pop­uli” as their edi­tor, essen­tially let­ting the aggre­ga­tion of links set the basic agenda. What is impor­tant to a lot of blog­ger must be an impor­tant story and there­fore deserves front page treatment.

The next role for the edi­tor is in estab­lish­ing whether facts are cor­rect or wrong. This is largely done through a level of checks and bal­ances in the blog world that can rival that of the best news orga­ni­za­tion. A story that is con­sid­ered impor­tant by “blog pop­uli” will get a lot of link­age and, using such tech­nolo­gies as track­back and com­ment sys­tem, will pro­vide much in the way of cor­rec­tions. As a result, dis­cus­sions start­ing in one loca­tion can feed another, be crit­i­cized by a third one, and all and all present a fuller pic­ture. How­ever, a lot of sys­tem (includ­ing my own), do not offer track­back yet. Once all blogs do, this kind of fact check­ing could increase the over­all value of the con­tent. Sys­tem like Tech­no­rati pro­vide a good idea of what other peo­ple are say­ing about a par­tic­u­lar entry. This, once again, goes to the fact check­ing nature of the editor’s role.

The Dis­tri­b­u­tion Issue

The nature of online pub­lish­ing is largely one of pull ver­sus push. Few peo­ple actu­ally receive news from web sites in the way they do from other media form. For exam­ple, I receive a news­pa­per every morn­ing. This is what is called a push model. I sub­scribed to that news­pa­per and do not have to remem­ber to go and buy it every day. How­ever, in a pull model, I decide where to go to get my infor­ma­tion. In a way, one could argue that broad­cast falls under both cat­e­gories: one decides what TV or radio sta­tion to pick up (pull) but once they did, the infor­ma­tion is pushed to them. Sim­i­larly, one decides what address to type into the URL box on their browser. How­ever, a small for­mat called RSS allows to turn weblogs into push medium. Using a client called an RSS reader, one can sub­scribe to a weblog and, after that, receive abstracts from the weblogs on a reg­u­lar basis. This model allows blog pub­lish­ers to end up with more reg­u­lar sub­scribers, and is key to the weblog world because these reminders do not require any extra work on the part of the reader to gather the infor­ma­tion. As a result, one can grow his/her read­er­ship. I’d rec­om­mend that every pub­lisher read­ing this look into the for­mat and con­sider imple­ment­ing it. There are some tremen­dous income oppor­tu­ni­ties there, rang­ing from pub­lish­ing of high­lights with text-advertising attached to them to offer­ing cus­tomized RSS feeds for an extra fee.

Jour­nal­ism or not?

So, in the final analy­sis, some blogs are emerg­ing as a new form of jour­nal­ism, while oth­ers do fall squarely in the world of diary. As a result, they can be used as use­ful knowl­edge man­age­ment tool and poten­tially micro-publishing platform.