About five years ago the now chaotic internet was a relatively calm and simple place. I’d check my regular news sites, get share updates from financial sites, visit the occasional shopping or corporate site. It was neat and tidy.
So what happened? I ask this because when you go onto the web these days you can hardly hear yourself think. The net of today is a noisy, busy, talkative and chatty place. It’s a beautiful, lively cacophony of creativity and empowerment.
The old days of the internet had the publishers in one corner delivering content, and the readers in the other corner reading it. Occasionally the readers would exploit the “interactivity of the web” and add comment on the publisher’s website in some obscure, sectioned-off, heavily-moderated and generally unsavoury place called a forum.
These days, however, every Jack and Jill is a publisher, competing for audiences but also sending audiences to publishers. The readers are not only reading, but they are playing the publisher’s game.
Some publishers like M-Web, iafrica.com and Mail & Guardian Online are hosting blogs on their site, others like Moneyweb and the Guardian Unlimited are getting their columnists and journalists to blog. Company CEOs, such as the head of Sun Microsystems in the US, are blogging their thoughts on the world from their corporate websites. Mostly, these are unedited. It seems that every man and his blog is getting involved in the writing game.
A new language is being created to describe this change. People are blogging, wikiing, vlogging, tagging and podcasting. There is the blogosphere, RSS feeds and RSS readers, cosmos links, trackbacks, pings, mash-ups and folksonomies. There is Pluck, Digg, Flickr, Technorati and Del.icio.us. As a publisher, if you don’t know what any of these mean, you are being overtaken.
Via blogs, users have found themselves empowered to become writers, commentators and consumer activists by broadcasting via their blogs any bad experiences. One negative blog entry from an influential, well-read blogger could really knock your business and create a bad impression. If it’s a positive blog, it would have the opposite effect.
Technorati is a blog search engine that tracks almost 41-million blogs and sites worldwide. It is to blog search what Google is to internet search. The blog search engine shows that the blogosphere is doubling every 5.5 months, which means we should have 80-million blogs by the end of the year. On average a new blog is created every second of the day and 50 000 blog posts created each hour.
A survey in April conducted by Reuters and BBC found that blogs were the least trusted news source, with TV the most trusted by a big margin. But that’s like telling me the telephone isn’t a trusted news source or communication device when we all know that it really depends who is on the other line.
There are good blogs and rubbish blogs. It’s impossible to see them as one thing. Some blogs carry more credibility and trust than mainstream media – as witnessed by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax whose prose many trusted more than CNN’s embedded reporters.
The internet has really messed things up for the traditional media model. It says that readers no longer want to be preached and rather want to consume their news as “conversations”.
It’s a paradigm leap for the established media, but it is something we should watch very, very carefully.
Matthew Buckland is publisher of the Mail & Guardian Online. E-mail him at [email protected]