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August 06, 2004

National Cruelty to Bloggers Week

The Register's Andrew Orlowski, tongue firmly in cheek, reports: Blogging 'cruelty' allegations rock post-DNC calm. He also makes some excellent cautionary points about the blogosphere's self-absorption, and zany notion that blogs will somehow supplant Big Media.

Andrew is among several folks who've pointed to by far the funniest comment posted under the Slashdot review of my book. It goes:

Blogs are going to change the world. Example:

OLD, TIRED MEDIA: "The Associated Press reported that Saddam Hussein was captured yesterday by American forces."

NEW, EXCITING MEDIA: "omg like kos reported that he saw on chris's blog that john trackbacked to mike's journal where he read about bob's girlfriend's brother's cousin who was like watching Fox News (fair and balanced my ass! lol) and they said something about saddam i dunno current music: brittney cleary - im me current mood: corpulent"

Notice the synergy of information and the ease by which information propagates throughout the blogosphere.

(Cross-posted to eJournal.)

Posted by Dan at August 6, 2004 06:34 AM

Comments


Have you heard about the 10 Stages of Internet Denial? They go something like this:

Stage 1: Ignorance. "I've never heard of this 'Interweb' thing."

Stage 2: Early Awareness. "My kids are into this 'Internet' videogaming fad. It'll pass, just like Virtual Reality did."

Stage 3: Raised Awareness. "What do you mean, look it up on Yahoo? Are you calling me a yahoo?"

Stage 4: Shock. "What! That Drudge bastard is quoting the story we killed last week!"

Stage 5: Fear. "Those damn Internet pseudo-journalists are going to steal our jobs! Can't somebody stop them?"

Stage 6: Paranoia. "It must be a massive right-wing conspiracy! So many people can't willingly scorn our trusted old medium for that crap. Who's backing them? It's all about music piracy and pornography!"

Stage 7: Despair. "It's the end of our civilization. The Internet spells the end of I(INSERT WORD HERE). Let's escape to the countryside before we turn into zombies."

Stage 8: Negotiation. "This Harry Knowles doesn't look so tough. We can buy this guy. Make him 'Associate Producer', the suckers fall for it every time."

Stage 9: Acceptance. "Can't you see I'm busy? Google it, instead of wasting my time."

Stage 10: Faked "in-the-know". "HTML is SO last year. The next big thing is RSS Feed. They do it with computers."

;-P

-A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

Posted by: A.R.Yngve at August 6, 2004 08:13 AM

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