Trolling

Six reasons why I prefer good blogs to most traditional journalism in the niche domains where my interests are greatest:

1. They respect their readers enough to open their comments.
2. When they make mistakes, they tend to correct them.
3. They understand that every factual statement that can be linked to its source, should be.
4. Because they have little default institutional authority, they go overboard backing up what they say with evidence. Unsourced assertions are frowned on. In this way, paradoxically enough, blogs are often more rigorous than traditional journalism, because they have to earn their readers' trust, not just assume it.
5. They're often written by practitioners, not just observers, and as a result they tend to get the details right.
6. If their information source is some random, unverified bar conversation or even just their own opinion, they're usually big enough to admit it.

(Quickly heading off the obvious question--why don't we do all this at Wired?--the answer is that we do some, we should certainly do more, and someday soon I hope we will. But it's tricky, because the print version exists independently from the website [see this Wikipedia entry for the complicated details] and we don't want the two versions of each article to diverge too much, for fear of confusion over which one is the "right" one. Meanwhile, nobody else in print media has really solved this problem yet either. And yes, I am aware of the irony that this is another distortion caused by inefficient distribution, exactly what I spotlight in other industries. Let's just say I know of what I speak.)

Three reasons why podcasts aren't a big deal (yet):

1. They don't have internal permalinks to section and subjects, so they don't get much link-love. UPDATE: Commentor #1 says it's technically doable, but clearly not many take advantage of that technology yet.
2. They aren't searchable. How hard would it be for some service to run podcasts through a quick-n-dirty voice recognition program to autogenerate transcripts? They don't need to be exactly right; 80% accurate search is better than the 0% we've got now. UPDATE: Michael Glenn in the comments points me to Podscope, which claims to do exactly what I asked for. Although it does seem to return relevent results, I can't get the podcasts to play in Firefox, so I can't comment on it yet.
3. They're meant to be consumed linearly, and pretty much at the (agonizingly slow and amateurish) pace they were created. Who, aside from trapped commuters, has time for that?

Three reasons why I'm not totally anti-DRM:

1. I'm not willing to install Myth TV just to avoid the broadcast flag.
2. I want more music and video. I'm happy to pay for it. Just don't jerk me around.
3. Even if Microsoft or whomever screw up their DRM, markets self correct. Millions of users tend to eventually get what they want.

Three reasons why I don't use a Mac:

1. Somebody at Wired should know what 97% of the country has to put up with.
2. Rhapsody.
3. Windows Media Center Edition 2005.

Three reasons why Linux is teh sux!

1. Okay, I'm not that much of a troll. I can't really go through with this.
2. I totally run it on all my machines, even the Roomba and the universal remotes.
3. Honestly, what's not to like about command lines?

(BTW, that wall painting at the top is a St. Augustine rebuffing the heretics. It's less grindingly literal than a picture of a troll.)

Comments

[LeegleechN]

It's actually possible to link inside of an audio file, you use the same command that grabs a part of an html document or anything else, for example for multipart download acceleration. There are tiny unnoticable frame errors at the very beginning and end, but all audio players correct for them and the defect is not noticable.

[Adam S.]

Why, oh why must we persist with this notion that bloggers are more reputable than the mainstream media because blogs are "self-correcting"? Or the even more dubious notion that bloggers are more fastidious than professional journalists because they must earn the reader's trust?

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not criticizing blogs or blogging. For a long time now, my consumption of blogs has outstripped my consumption of other forms of journalism. I'm just criticizing the the blog triumphalism that presumably won't go away until the form becomes so widespread that we all begin derisively referring to the MSB (mainstream blogosphere).

I haven't thought about this much, but off the cuff I suspect the main reasons I read blogs are not because of their greater reliability but instead because of the following:

1. Voice. Blogs have a voice, most print journalism does not. Perhaps it's not surprising that the only publication I subscribe to is the Economist, which also has a strong voice.

2. Format. The continuously-updated, bite-size format of most blogs is well suited both to the way in which I prefer to consume media, and also to many of the most important developing stories of the day. As has been pointed out many times elsewhere, traditional media are sometimes hobbled by the he-said/she-said conventions of journalistic objectivity.

3. Expertise. As you mention, there are a lot of special-interest blogs out there that are simply fantastic.

[christopher baus]

Chris,

I totally agree with your DRM stance. I think you are one of the only pundits talking any sense on this topic. I think a lot of technologists are going to miss out big opportunities by being religiously anti-DRM.

[Nicole Simon]

You can read bloggers from all over the world, but it takes a podcast to hear their accents. ;)

[RichK]

I'm stunned; how did I ever miss all of these Rhapsody blogs? I think you just dramatically changed my musical life.

Today, I bounce between MP3 blogs, Rhapsody, Oink's Pink Palace (bit-torrent), paper mags like Big Takeover, Parasol.com, etc for my music exposure/news/community/consumption... (notice, no iTunes/iPod).

Thanks to your post, I just subscribed to about ten Rhapsody blogs -- all of which looked great in my first subscribe-glance. I'll now ruthlessly weed them out in Bloglines (and I imagine discover a few more).

I just need a few more hours in the day now ; >

One more thing: I've been trying to find a spare couple of hours to do a compare/contrast of Rhapsody, Napster and new Yahoo services. Yahoo's prices are tough to pass up (especially with to-go options), even if I've been using Rhapsody for a couple of years now....

I think the Rhapsody blogosphere maybe rendered that exercise irrelevant. I wonder if Real "real"izes the stickiness that this self-formed community can create for its service....once I'm an active consumer/contributor to a Rhapsody-blog circle, abandoning Rhapsody for Napster or Yahoo just became infinitely more difficult to do.....

Rhapsody itself, up to now, offered me no real barrier to change. I don't keep playlists in Rhapsody, I found they grew too large and cumbersome. I really just using it as a sampling medium -- though I do use Replay to do some capturing ; >

Anyway, all of this seems to really represent the culmination of possiblity in the intersecting worlds of long-tail, word-of-mouth, viral, sticky marketing, etc. etc.....

Keep up the good work.

[Brian]

One advantage of blogs that often gets overlooked is that blogs are excellent aggregators. One alert blogger can cite sources from all over the blogosphere (as well as from the MSM), thereby not only informing the reader, but saving the reader a lot of work and effort.

[Michael Glenn]

You can search Podcasts via Podscope
http://www.podscope.com

Works pretty well too.

[George Hotelling]

Jon Udel built a tool that makes MP3 soundbites, which implements what Commenter #1 talks about.

[Alan Levine]

Scope it:
http://www.podscope.com/search.php?q=long+tail

[Eszter Hargittai]

Thanks for the nice "six reasons" write-up. For those of us who've thought about this, these points may seem obvious (they do to me), but it took quite a while to convey this information to my students last Winter when we discussed the credibility of bloggers in my Internet and Society class. Next year I'll be sure to point students to this post. (A propos my course, The Long Tail article in Wired was one of their favorite readings during the course as per the feedback I collected at the end of class.)

[Eszter Hargittai]

Sorry for posting twice, I had meant to add that I addressed the point of linking to sources with respect to a Wired story back here. There were some comments following the post explaining why you may not do this at Wired (somewhat similar to what you mention above in your post).

[Eric Wahlforss]

Who has time to listen to podcasts?
People who..
- ..bring their podcasts to the gym or when they go jogging
- ..like to listen to something before they go to bed
- ..listen to podcasts when working (mostly music podcasts)
- ..and like you pointed out, people who commute or travel
- ..+many more situations

Point is: it adds up!

[John Furrier]

on podcasts...the keyword is "yet" they are a force and it highlights the power of the long tail. Good content always proceeds discovery and navigation...so I expect discovery tools to evolve very quickly. hint hint

[Greg]

Please pardon my ignorance, because I have no experience with podcasts, but I have the vision that you are talking about some kind of MP3 posting or playlist sharing, which may have something in common with blog syndication feeds, and I cant help wondering if for some kind of sound recording it might make sense to be able to search on a series of tones rather than, or as well as words to find a certain kind of content.

I recall reading in Bill Gates book several years back his prediction that you may one day be able to search for a piece of music by humming a few bars of it. Is there any search engine that would allow something like that on the far horizon?

[offshore web design company india delhi]

Blogs will be a huge directory over a period of time, which will universalise the thoughts of global community on a single platform on any issues and will be the biggest reference source over a period of time.