| Nickname: |  MartinGarciaAlbuquerque, NM United States |
| Blog: | pinpointpages.blogspot.com/ |
Source: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009409
INFORMATION AGE
The Blog Mob
"Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."
BY JOSEPH RAGO
Wednesday, December 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. ESTBlogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg`s press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.
The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there`s more of it, because anybody can chip in. There`s more "choice"--and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.
The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren`t much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .
The way we write affects both style and substance. The loquacious formulations of late Henry James, for instance, owe in part to his arthritis, which made longhand impossible, and instead he dictated his writing to a secretary. In this aspect, journalism as practiced via blog appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form. Its closest analogue might be the (poorly kept) diary or commonplace book, or the note scrawled to oneself on the back of an envelope--though these things are not meant for public consumption. The reason for a blog`s being is: Here`s my opinion, right now.
The right now is partially a function of technology, which makes instantaneity possible, and also a function of a culture that valorizes the up-to-the-minute above all else. But there is no inherent virtue to instantaneity. Traditional daily reporting--the news--already rushes ahead at a pretty good clip, breakneck even, and suffers for it. On the Internet all this is accelerated.
The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element--here`s my opinion--is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought--instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.
This cross-referential and interactive arrangement, in theory, should allow for some resolution to divisive issues, with the market sorting out the vagaries of individual analysis. Not in practice. The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren`t. The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.
Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line. Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions--John Kerry always providing useful material--while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq. Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.
Leftward fatuities too are easily found: The fatuity matters more than the politics. If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad`s judgment of newspapering--"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"--they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.
Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses. And part of it, especially in politics, has to do with conservatives. In their frustration with the ancien régime, conservatives quite eagerly traded for an enlarged discourse. In the process they created a counterestablishment, one that has adopted the same reductive habits they used to complain about. The quarrel over one discrete set of standards did a lot to pull down the very idea of standards.
Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.
Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we`ve allowed decay to pass for progress.
Mr. Rago is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.
- One reason I have not added any type of blog to my site is because I feel I have no genuinely unique or new idea to share about my industry. I read the articles about our earth’s health. I agree with some aspects and I disagree with others. Within that, I have found a path to follow, which involved the publicizing of earthborn & handmade merchandise. I figure, if I am going to “buy” I might as well buy items that have little impact on the earth. That includes the entire process of making things I buy. So having my own blog would just be me, rehashing past articles or stories I agree with. Really, there’s no knew content. Therefore no blog.
The problem is that the Internet is organized by the topics you want to find. If I want to find information about cars because I am a car enthusiast, organizing by topic is great. If I want to find car parts for sale, organizing by topic is also great. The difficulty comes when I am trying to catch impulse buys and make it evident that my products are what you want. There is the difficulty. Provide quality unique content in a blog, that directly relates to what you sell. Then, as people look for that content, the search engines will pick up the blog and your site might get the opportunity to take the car enthusiast and turn them into a parts buyer.
So, how do you implement a blog, without the blog, just for the sake of having a blog and the search engines to see you? Is that the true goal? Get the search engines to find you (through content). Worry about the relevancy, factual presentation, and all those other literary goals and concerns later.
I am still struggling with understanding what a blog will do for my customers if I am not doing more than searching the internet for stories to share.
By 
By Reporting`s mass appeal
Amateurs working as journalists are giving rise to a new wave of `citizen newspapers.` Results are mixed.By Mayrav Saar, Special to The Times
December 20, 2006
A woman in Venice Beach reviews "The Lion King" and declares it the best musical she`s seen — of the four she`s ever seen. In Dallas, a group of professional reporters and "citizen journalists" collaborate on a federal government exposé. And a Milwaukee news magazine`s experiment with amateur reporters yields fresh insights into city planning, fire department politics and "taco butt," that unsightly parting of the derrière caused by too-tight denim inseams.
Is this the future of journalism?Across the country "citizen newspapers" are springing up, full of promise, energy and atrocious spelling errors. They`re largely written by unpaid, untrained and unedited citizen reporters, who say they "commit acts of journalism" more for kicks than out of a sense of civic calling.
In Los Angeles, one of those revolutionaries is Ariel Vardi, 24, an Israeli by way of France, who has no journalism training and doesn`t think much of his own writing abilities ("I`m more of a photographer. I`m not fluent in English").
Vardi is the founder and editor of BrooWaha, an online collection of news, reviews and opinion pieces that purports to cover Los Angeles the way professional media don`t. The site is edited by Vardi in the evenings, when he comes home from his job as a software engineer. He says he doesn`t check for quality or accuracy. He just makes sure the site is devoid of advertisements, fiction pieces and pornography.
"I am just trying to get as much information for L.A. as I can and give readers the opportunity to choose what they find interesting," Vardi said.
This month Reuters, the world`s largest international multimedia news agency, partnered with Yahoo to create You Witness News, a site where amateur photojournalists can upload their work for display on Reuters.com and Yahoo News. These works are as varied as pictures of Santa Claus piñatas in Mexico and firefighters battling a blaze in Moorpark. All are being sifted through by Reuters editors, and anything of value to mainstream media might be purchased and reprinted.
That Reuters has chosen to begin this experiment with photography is significant. Photos typically don`t lie, and part of the success of a photographer is being at the right place at the right time: Charles Porter, then a 25-year-old loan specialist, won the Pulitzer Prize for his iconic shot of a firefighter cradling the body of a dead baby after the Oklahoma City bombing.
Reporting, though, is another matter. Chris Ahearn, president of Reuters media group, said it`s unclear whether You Witness News will accept citizen-reported news stories in the near future. But there`s a telling toolbar on the site filled with reporting tips from Wikinews and other sources that is basically a DIY J-school for the lunch-hour dabbler.
"We`re trying to lead the way to help people innovate for the next generation of journalists," Ahearn said.
Gannett, which owns 90 newspapers including USA Today, has gone a step further, with an experiment in citizen journalism dubbed "crowdsourcing." It brings readers into the news-gathering process, beginning with reporting on government wrongdoing, including a reader-analyzed investigation of a sewer utility.
For his part, Vardi came up with the idea for BrooWaha while finishing his computer science master`s degree at Georgia Institute of Technology. He established a rating system for the articles — a kind of public system of vetting — that helps the most popular stories rise to the top. He worked on the architecture of the site in Atlanta and launched it in August in Los Angeles. In the next couple of months, he hopes to start a BrooWaha in San Francisco, New York and Atlanta.
"In newspapers, there aren`t enough journalists to cover everything. On campus, there were so many students; they see everything that happens. I thought giving them a tool to share everything they see would be really helpful," Vardi said.
So far, the crew is falling short of that mark. The site is heavy on opinion pieces — some containing the kinds of factual errors and belligerent soap boxing of standard-issue blogs. But there is also a story about the on-court etiquette of pickup basketball games in L.A. that sheds enough light on the topic to make a subculture seem accessible.
Still, Vardi admits, the site has a long way to go. He`s working on a design feature that will encourage authors to write more about what they see and less about what they think. Such a focus has already worked in Dallas, where the Examiner`s professional journalists have partnered with citizen reporters to expose questionable Congressional earmarks nationwide, according to PressThink, an open-source journalism site.
Vardi said he wanted the site to cover the underground scenes of Los Angeles and "to make writing become a hip activity again."
The site`s numbers are modest so far — it received 50,000 hits last month and has registered 400 or so users — but he is optimistic about its prospects.
"There is still a lot of work to control and increase the quality of everything that is submitted. But I think it has a high potential," he said.
"What you`re seeing is a radical new way of doing journalism. We`re back to the time of the lonely pamphleteer or the tramp printers in the Europe," said Philip Meyer, Knight Chair in Journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Just as lonely pamphleteers organized into newspapers, all of this will be organized into some kind of structure."
Meyer doubts sites like BrooWaha will replace traditional media, but with advances in technology, the nature of "the media" is in play at the moment.
"What you`re seeing right now isn`t the end product; it`s in development," he said. "We old-timers look at it and say, `This is terrible. This isn`t journalism.` But, in fact, this is something that has value and needs to be developed."
Fabrice Florin, executive director of NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit news rating site that launched this month out of Mill Valley, compared the situation to the Wild West before the sheriffs. "We found some great citizen journalism pieces, and we found some terrible ones," Florin said.
Vardi says it`s hard to avoid the terrible stories entirely, but he`s trying to hone a system to keep inaccurate stories to a minimum and allow good writing, informative pieces and thoughtful prose to flourish. "I think most people who write for BrooWaha were bloggers before, and they`re not used to the format of BrooWaha. But that`s going to change," he said.
Journalism professor Meyer, for one, can`t wait.
"I close every semester by saying, `I`ve just taught you journalism as it was practiced in my day. The journalism in your day is going to be different,` " Meyer said. " `It`s up to you to invent it, please don`t mess it up.` "- Interesting post. I think you are seeing some experimentation with large media companies not wanting to pay the salary of a college educated writer. To me, it`s just like a musician trying to be the top artist on the billboard charts.
Sure there are some great, undiscovered musicians out there will very little to no musical education. You also have a massive amount of musicians that think they are great... yet really are not. (maybe that`s me?)
In the end, it`s all about what sells. It might be funny to listen to some poor English speaking, Vietnamese guy sing "she bangs," but that is only funny, or interesting for a short period of time. Eventually, everyone returns to the true musician for melodies and poetry that is well written and well recorded.
So, how does this tie into journalism? There are a mass amount of people who think they can write just as good as the professionals. They may be right when choosing one topic to write about. But as a whole, the amateur writer will not be able to continually produce written works of art.
I am getting so tired of reading misspellings, typos, less than factual, and completely... Blah blah blah, type of writings. I hate to read. When I read a well written, on topic, short and concise article, the strain on my brain power for reading is decreased. When the article is chuck full of miss information and grammatical errors, I quickly stop reading. I then have to decide if the information is really worth reading if the professional level of writing is telling me the content may not be professional either.
I believe the use of nonprofessional writers will pass. Or at least be seriously limited.
- Quote "I believe the use of nonprofessional writers will pass"
While it`s true that amateur writer don`t polish their prose, they often have substance the pro don`t. Top students don`t go to journalist school. Journalists don`t get paid much. Editors control what`s published, etc...In my local paper I see the same washed-out PC articles or columns that actually do reader a disservice because of their untruth. On the other hand I always check out the letters section for more interesting stuff. Even then many of my letters don`t get published because they tell the truth.
For example the letters section often publishes the school superintendent letters, which are full of garbage such as "there`s a shortage of skilled workers". Is there really any shortage in a market economy, where price will rise due to perceived "shortage" and therefore supply will increase also, granted with some lag, so new equilibrium will be established. Educators always say "shortage" of students, while reality is workers` wage remain low because of surplus of underemployed people.
I can cite many more examples of untruths because of personal agenda or PC. Another of my favorites is about "religion of peace" myth published by majority of media, who self-sensor of what the followers of that religion are actually doing to the societies they live in but do not integrate themselves in, and even worse seek dominance over.
Luckily there`s the Internet that no one can control - yet. Therefore BrouWaha - which is a modified word from "brouhaha" which means "noisy simultaneous talks" - is welcome to counteract corporation-controlled or money-controlled media, just like You Tube is welcome as alternative to TV.
- "real journalism will always sell more than uninteresting personal ramblings."
As Clinton said, that depends on what you define as real.
Take Thomas Friedman`s "The Earth is Flat". Many of his reviewers take issues with his style of writing, especially the word "flat". Then his material is also subject to rebuttals from economists and writers alike. What is left then would be sensational journalism.
By Search marketing 101
Advertising Age has released a detailed PDF called the Search Marketing Fact Pack 2006 that promises to explain the complex realms of search engine optimization and keyword bidding, to the everyday advertising professional.
`Ad Age` Search Marketing Fact Pack Released
52-Page Data Guide on Engines, Keywords, Sites and Studies
By Abbey Klaassen
Published: November 05, 2006NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Search-engine marketing solves a basic need of connecting potential buyers to sellers, but until recently, it has lived a low-profile life in the media and advertising world.
80% of traffic
Today, however, it`s hard to ignore the stats: About 80% of internet traffic begins at a search engine, according to Harris Interactive, and DoubleClick reports 41% of web users use search for simple navigation, typing a query to find a brand rather than typing a URL directly into their browser.
And how the business has grown: The latest figures from Forrester indicate search marketing will be a $7 billion business this year. While it may not be as flashy as TV, search is one of the best ways to extend the life of a 30-second spot. Ignoring it is a stumble few marketers can afford, which is why Advertising Age has compiled its first comprehensive Fact Pack devoted to search marketing.
Comprehensive data
Sure, Ad Age has been covering search since its early days, you know, 1995 or so, when Google was still a glimmer in Larry and Sergey`s eyes and the big news was that the Lycos search engine decided to put ads on its site. But the just-released Ad Age Search Marketing Fact Pack expands our promise of providing marketers with the best, most comprehensive data and ideas to help them do their jobs smarter and more efficiently.
For example, on page 38 we detail 12 search-engine optimization strategies for 2007 -- you should know that adding tags, wikis and RSS to the content on your site can do wonders for your website`s search rankings. Or track the life of a search on page 30 with a case study of the term "HDTV." Or check out the cool eye-tracking study detailed on page 40 to see what search marketers mean when they talk about the "Golden Triangle."
First search agency rankings
Additionally, Ad Age presents its first ranking of search advertising agencies. That ranking, based on estimated revenue generated by SEM/SEO operations, presents the top 20 agencies, which you`ll find on pages 48-49. Of course, if you`re already lost with all this talk of SEM and SEO, you might want to skim the glossary on page 45 first.
We should point out that search marketing, as with all digital media and technologies, is a hot topic and thus covered by several different trade groups, research companies and publications. Some methodologies and totals may vary slightly but taken in full, this Fact Pack should provide a good picture of where search is now and where it`s headed.Source: http://adage.com/digital/article.php?article_id=112896
- In terms of the result of the poll Martin, I have to imagine that the information would be construed as far more useful if it wasn`t simple a link to another resource. As this is designed as a discussion forum, providing some opinion or outlook on the resource you`re referencing would seem to me to go a long way toward increasing the value of your post.
- I updated the post. Thanks for your input Chuck.
I think nowdays 80% of online users are aware of the benefits of "Search Engine Marketing".
It is important to gather as much information related to Search Engine Marketing and its benefit.raj
- Raj - please don`t use white text on a white background for your links - as any good search engine marketer worth their salt will tell you, that`s spammy.
By 
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