« Remembering Kosovo | Main | Underpaid, oversexed and over here »

Blogging Davids

Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) has a rather long title for his book on blogging: An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths.

Instapundit_ArmyOfDavids.jpg

Yes, it's about the game of David vs. Goliath in modern times, where battles are no longer fought on swords, where might is not necessarily right.

Simply put, in what Economist.com describes as Outreach vs. Outrage, Reynolds says bloggers have shaken up the mainstream media (or MSM, in blogger parlance).

Reynolds points to some of the bloggers' advantages. First, their numbers. There is only one New York Times, but technorati.com tracks nearly 30 million blogs. With so many eyes, the blogosphere -- some still believe it is infested with furious pyjama-clad scribes -- reacts quickly to breaking news.

And that's precisely bloggers' Achilles' heel. With a few exceptions, bloggers do little original reporting. Posting opinions online is cheap, but news-gathering is not. But...

"Mr Reynolds sees this changing as technology costs fall still further and bloggers find niches in local news. But the revolution is unlikely to destroy “old media” entirely.

For one thing, with no MSM, what would bloggers deconstruct?"

BTW, Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee. I guess he stands on the side of the Davids.

Like me. Like so many of us.

Thanks reader HHC for the heads-up.

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.jeffooi.com/mt32/mt-tb.cgi/155

Comments

When Mark Russinovich broke the story that Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far by distributing a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers, it has become a David and Goliath story of the tech blogs defeating a mega-corporation.

The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us.

INTERNET does not operate in a legal vacuum.
Read this before you post a comment in this blog!

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)