Newsscan.com’s The Future Of Publishing: The Web, Of Course says that computer scientist Ramesh Jain is convinced that “the importance of paper publications is becoming less significant compared to appearance of ideas or articles in cyberspace. ‘None of my articles that appeared in well respected journals got the attention of relevant people so rapidly … I am convinced that this is clearly the direction for ideas propagation and distribution.'” Read his interview with John Gehl in Ubiquity magazine.
The trouble, in my opinion, is finding good blogs to read. If everyone has one, how do you figure out the difference between a good and bad one without slogging through ’em all? Where do I find them to start with? Yeah, there is word-of-mouth and advertising, but we all know that entails being popular (which is not necessarily good) and I don’t want to have to pay money to have my blog listed on some elitist list and hence, read.
I worry about some blogs gaining artificial relevance purely through visibility.
To which someone asked: “You mean just like Dan Rather???”
I see how the blog is an independent journalistic medium, which allows the freedom of expression and publication without fear of your employer censoring what you have to say. (Which is why Microsoft’s latest ploy to “take over” the blogosphere worries me. Will share a blogger’s experience with that in a bit here.)
But, like back in the day when every idiot could make a website saying “Hi, my name is Jimmy, I like Pikachu and Magic cards, and these are my favorite songs,” any Tom, Dick and Harry can make a blog (and has the right to, don’t get me wrong). Like websites and scouring the internet/Google for information germane to my queries, I now have to wade through several before I find ones I like. Sometimes, these are hidden, too. What if someone had something cool to say, but his/her blog just got lost in the quagmire of blogoland? How do I know something is cool if I haven’t seen it first? Yeah, I know, “cool” is in the eye of the beholder.
What do you do then? Rely on friends and “net sources?” Sorry, my friends don’t know everything, and technology has always had an elitism attached with it. Just because the current royalty of blogging recommends a blog doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one for everyone’s purposes. I’m talking about content hell. I also don’t know how one would go about creating a comprehensive Blog Directory without conducting a census or having the access that a phone company has to phone numbers and associated information.
The same someone says, “Keep slogging. More stuff = more slogging. Recommendations should never replace your own judgment.”
But, the searches don’t help. How do you search for something that the search engine doesn’t know exists, or doesn’t place relevance on. I need material on which to place judgment. See my Catch-22?
