As you can see in my updates on the health status of my father, I have been a bit too distracted to post this weekend.
That is not the sole reason I have written very little. I was so disgusted by the reactions of both the right-wing and the left-wing to the indictments against Lewis Libby arising from the CIA agent leak investigation that I needed a break.
I wonder, what is the point? Why blog?
An article at Forbes.com entitled “Attack of the Blogs” encapsulates what I see entirely, even though the article is written from a business point of view, with the attacks of the title directed against products and companies rather than political parties and their supporters.
From the article:
“Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality,” says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. “The potential for brand damage is really high,”says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft’s main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. “There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it’s juicy.”
Remove the word “brand” from the Blackshaw quote, and it covers the political side of blogging quite well, especially the remark about bad information that never gets corrected because there will always be some blogger out there that will repeat it, no matter how often it has been refuted.
Dave Taylor at his blog Intuitive Systems agrees with the thesis of the Forbes.com article and summarizes some reactions he has observed in blogworld that in a show of ironic non-self-awareness illustrate exactly the tendencies in the article that the quoted bloggers are reacting against. Taylor then summarizes the points from the article with his own take on them (again from a business perspective, but it is easy to substitute “politics” for “business” when reading it to see the trends are the same):
1. You Don’t Know Who Is Blogging and Why
This is a point that even bloggers admit is true when we talk about “fake blogs” or “character blogs” and criticize typically miserable attempts by corporations to plug into the blogosphere with the “Lincoln Fry Blog” (from McDonalds, since shut down) and Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum Blog (a Flash-based site that has nothing to do with blogging other than the word appears on the site).
Sure, these are poorly executed and obviously fake, but there’s a somewhat naive assumption in the blogosphere that everyone is genuine, everything is built around “credibility” and that if anyone were to dare even fake their motivation for writing a weblog entry (get paid to blog), well, that’d be terrible.
Consider the fate of Marqui, who dared to offer cash to bloggers who would write about their clients. The bloggers could opt whether to admit they were sponsored or not, but Marqui was roundly vilified nonetheless.
I mean, for all you know, dear reader, Daniel Lyons is my pseudonym or my best pal from our business school days. He’s not, but do you trust me 100% given that you don’t know me?
2. Misinformation and Lies are Quickly Disseminated
You need merely to look at the breathless analysis of as-yet-unreleased services and products in the blogosphere to see just how much whispers and innuendo can affect business. Google’s right in the cross-hairs with that one, and people were busy disassembling their still unreleased Google Base product without any more information than a single screenshot that might have been faked.
Or ask Apple Computer, where they have had to change their method of disseminating information to the media due to incessant leaks and misinformation about new products. The Motorola ROKR phone suffered from this prejudged-by-bloggers fate, as did the Video iPod, which has had to “prove itself” in a way that previous products have never had to worry about.
3. Bloggers are not Subject to Libel Laws
While I really want to say that this is patently false, it is surprisingly difficult to find any legal cases that have been successfully prosecuted where the defendant was a blogger or was publishing their libelous material on a weblog. There are cases like Aaron Wall versus Traffic Power (see my writeup on the case for background), but the case isn’t about what Aaron wrote as much as what other people wrote as comments on his site.
The combination of being able to go back and edit weblog entries, the relative anonymity of most weblogs, and the lack of precedent suggests that Lyons does have a good point here, one that we should be thinking about quite seriously. It has profound implications for the legitimacy of blogging that every blogger seeks.
4. Bloggers are not Journalists
I’ve wrestled with this point myself, having been on panels about blogging sponsored by the Society for Professional Journalists and similar. It’s fashionable to be skeptical of journalists, especially after con men like Jayson Blair sully the reputation of even the most revered bastion of professional journalism, but it is nonetheless true that the vast majority of journalists check their facts and ensure they have at least two sources to corroborate information.
Bloggers, on the other hand, are happy to cite other bloggers as the source of information, a tortuous chain that often ends at a single person opining something controversial and interesting about a company or product. Bloggers also don’t respect moratoriums on publishing information from companies, arrogantly believing that the blogosphere is more important than any sort of announcement schedule by the organization. As a result, few companies pre-release information to even the most serious and professional of bloggers.
To be fair, there are bloggers who take the responsibilities of their bully pulpit more seriously and try to avoid gossip and innuendo in favor of facts and direct sources, but they really are in the minority.
And so, enough…
There are more points that I think can be culled from Daniel Lyons’ “Attack of the Blogs” article in Forbes, but let’s stop here as I think I’ve made my point.
Like any other medium, blogs are just tools that will be used thoughtfully and artfully for communication by some and viciously and vindictively to propagate lies and misinformation by others.
The important thing is to step back from the overt bias in the Forbes article and read through it a second time, asking yourself whether anything said is really false, or simply just a bit breathless and one-sided.
I am tired of the thoughtlessly, relentlessly predictable reactions I see. Few are interested in what is right for the nation, they are too busy “scoring points” against the “other side.”
We are all on the same side, but we have forgotten this simple fact.
Rome fell after centuries of success not because of external forces, but because of internal rot.
Before the invasion of Iraq, from the outside the United States appeared at its strongest, invincible.
Now?
