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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JUNE 10, 2003
The Wild World of "Open-Source Media" [Page 2 of 2] HOT TOPICS. You can sort results based on "freshness" -- how recently someone has posted something about you -- or "authority" -- how popular the blogs are that are talking about you. (Sifry defines authority as the number of links going to and from on a blogger's site. The theory is that if lots of people are linking to a blog, it must be important.) His invention "was pure ego gratification," he laughs. Sites (Daypop) and Blogdex also rank popular blogs. It hasn't taken long, however, for the impact of Sifry's software to exceed his harmless narcissism. In the eight months since Technorati appeared, it has become a tool not just for bloggers but for anyone who wants to discover what's on the global agenda. At Technorati you can see not only which blogs link to which but which bits of news -- culled from 4,500 media sites, plus from corporate, government, and little-known Web sites -- are getting the most action. On June 3, the most-linked-to stories were an article by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a USA Today article entitled "Ex Army Boss: Pentagon won't admit reality in Iraq," and a diary entry by -- who else? -- Salam Pax. Seeing what people are talking most about prompts readers to weigh in on the key issues of the day. Is everyone talking about whether weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq? Post a link to an article along with your thoughts, and it will instantly become part of the blogosphere. NO GIANT KILLER. "If it's interesting and provocative, it will be passed around," says David Weinberger, a blogger (www.hyperorg.com) and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, one of the first books to demonstrate how the Internet was turning business upside down. "Blogging is a bottom-up, grassroots, first-person news network," he adds. "It's more multisided and more objective than any single news source." Gawker's Nick Denton calls it "open-source media" -- a twist on the concept of open-source software such as Linux, whose programmers make their code available to the community and collaborate to improve upon it. As with open-source software, the costs of production are modest, because readers send in tips and commentary that contribute to the final product. And like the software, open-source media is less formal than traditional media -- blogs bear little resemblance to a glossy publication. It's that last issue that lends a touch of fantasy to the inevitable speculation that cyberblogs will one day destroy -- or at least maim -- such august media names as AOL Time Warner (AOL ), The Washington Post (WPO ), or the NBC subsidiary of General Electric (GE ). Though blogs may be fast publishing on the cheap, even the most committed bloggers don't see them as a threat to journalism. FREE-FOR-ALL. For one thing, most blogs are reactions and commentaries related to news published in mainstream publications. Without the media giants, there would be little to discuss. Instead, experts see blogs as complementary to established media. "It's a new kind of communication," says Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. To say that blogs will harm traditional media, he adds, "is like saying that instant messenger will kill e-mail." Adds Back-to-Iraq's Christopher Allbritton: "Blogs are the garnish to a well-balanced media diet." The point, bloggers say, is the Web has room for everyone. After all, that's what blogging is all about: Collaborative communication in a truly new medium.
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