Malcontents pecking out their every brainwave through that security blanket called a keyboard might’ve brought blogging into your vocabulary, but a website of nothing but idiosyncratic opinion has become a pretty primitive format heading into summer 2006, as the medium evolves beyond pages of solitary text. Lately, it’s been all about the “Me Media”, motivating Rupert Murdoch to herald this a golden age – and even if the complete evaporation of print media isn’t happening tomorrow, nobody has the right to be entirely sure. The year of Rathergate (and Adscam) begat partisan trust funds shoveled into schemes like The Huffington Post and Pajamas Media, founded on the expectation that a higher calibre of malcontent would be motivated by a broader platform. But having access to every morsel of information has necessitated hierarchies not unlike a pop chart – especially when cranks get tired of feeding, let alone reading, comment threads – even prompting AOL to slap the dubious Netscape brand on a social news site. Wasn’t hyperlocal participatory citizen journalism supposed to be all the rage? Maybe not, considering how fears of being besieged by an onslaught of websites from amateur talent more compelling than pros have been tempered with time; a power shift that accommodates the people formerly known as the audience is more realistic than media companies expecting that “users” will do the heavy creative lifting on their behalf, then simply package that volunteer input for advertisers. The inability of Canwest’s Dose to harness that energy into print aimed at a supposedly elusive demographic was one such flop – however, the online audience isn’t receptive to anyone who tries too hard to bait their attention. Niche conversations endured the dot-com crash because there is no way to monetize most topics for the passive masses, but keeping topics closer to home has inspired cityblog franchises, where the monkey typewriter principle favours vague observations over interactive rants, although visuals are proving a more effective method of relaying local flavour anyhow. Waiting to be explored is the true definition of cyberjournalism, now that Wi-Fi will supply reporters with more room to roam, if they can appreciate the idea of delivering the first word on a subject rather than the last.
[Weekly Bloog cover courtesy of Paved's logo designer Brett Lamb]
Hah, for some reason I was suspecting Blamb had done that cover!
this might be the first post in weeks that doesn’t reference mary jo eustace.