Bloggers on the Radio Post-Mortem
Lots of comments on the Blogging of the President last night. I think the most interesting comment is from David Weinberger who picks up on a theme from his must read Small Pieces, Loosely Joined and argues that the increasing “a-listing” of the biggest blogs threatens to return to a “newspaper” model. His book postulates that the nature of “authority” has been subverted by the web and now you have anonymous folks like Atrios viewed as “authorities” in their respective fields.
I find that this follows a similar line of development which continues to this day, where the a few gigantor sites command the vast majority of the traffic. On the plus side, niche sites like ours cater to previously unreached segments of the market… even if the natural tendency of blogs is to aggregate at the “higher-being” level, there is still plenty of traffic for the rest of us to work with. If we don’t suck.
That, and, we could always be annointed “authorities” if we suck even less.