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Earlier this month I quoted William Safire on how mainstream media will coexist with weblogs.
But one thing Safire said struck me as missing the power of the blogosphere:
On the challenge from bloggers: The platform print, TV, Internet, telepathy, whatever will change, but the public hunger for reliable information will grow. Blogs will compete with op-ed columns for views you can use, and the best will morph out of the pajama game to deliver serious analysis and fresh information, someday prospering with ads and subscriptions. The prospect of profit will bring bloggers in from the meanstream to the mainstream center of comment and local news coverage.
Safire seems to consider bloggers wanna-be journalists. I felt he was missing the big picture, and started looking for a way to specify just what he was overlooking.
A recent conversation with my friend Elliot McGucken provided the key info. Elliot is a Professor of physics and programming at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as the proprietor of the Jolly Roger websites, which host discussions of great books and philosophy.
In conversation on an unrelated subject, Elliot mentioned Metcalf’s Law, a mathemetical principal used to describe the power of a network. In layman’s terms, as described by Marc Andreeson:
A network in general behaves in such a way that the more nodes that are added to it, the whole thing gets more valuable for everyone on it because all of a sudden there’s all this new stuff that wasn’t there before. You saw it with the phone system. The more phones that are on the network, the more valuable it is to everyone because then you can call these people. Federal Express, in order to grow their business, would add a node in Topeka and business in New York would spike. You see it on the Internet all the time. Every new node, every new server, every new user expands the possibilities for everyone else who’s already there.
So with everyone in the blogosphere reading other blogs, and using input from them, as well as from those who post comments, to provide additional valuable reporting and analysis, the power of the blogosphere increases with every new blogger and reader who joins it.
Mainstream media doesn’t network—they’re secretive. They have to get their scoops. Reporters compete instead of talking to each other. And they take a high and mighty approach to their own readers, as if they’re in competition with the public. They try to be the high priests of information, using the power of the press to build their own stature while withholding that power from others—and those days are coming to a close.
Conclusion: the power of cooperation and networking, as described by Metcalf’s Law, differentiates the blogosphere from mainstream media.
For the mathematically inclined, Metcalf’s law is ((Number of Nodes) times (Number of Nodes minus 1)).
#1
#2I think you nailed it. And one of the coolest things about blogs is the comments. If a blog misses something, someone will almost certainly spot it and put it in a comment. Newspapers don't provide much space for letters, and if they get something wrong they rarely admit it.
My biggest concern with blogs has been with accuracy. How do we know what we are reading in blogs in correct?
Then it struck me, I have the same skepticism about what I read in other publishing areas, such as newspapers and books. I won't even include the laughingstock called television news.
Hopefully, the blogging world will work together to deliver accurate information, and will self-correct when inaccuracies are reported.
If that does happen, then I can see the blogsphere being more powerful than the major media companies, and a truly democratic forum.