It is official! This blog has entered Technorati, which classifies blogs by tags and tries to promote them, and creates a floating chaos in which a combination of tagging by keywords, categories and "favourite" labels bundles content and shoves them around the Internet.
Phew! If this is an alternative to journalism, I am not sure if it will work.
Technorati is commendable for its work, but I do believe some kind of an organization of content going beyond tags and keywords and automated software will be needed. If academic PhDs and Nobel prizes need citations by well-regarded people, I presume the same might apply for blogs. Or at least, the better blogs will be paid for, either by subscribers or advertisers -- and there must be real "blogamediaries"
I am sceptical about a democratic soap box oratory on the Net passing off as "citizen journalism!"
I spoke to the Delhi Bloggers Bloc on June 7, and taking a media-centric view, wanted the men/women among bloggers to be separated from the boys/girls of the Blogosphere.
Why should a good blogger be different from a good newspaper columnist or journalist? In the end, I see good blogs as an extension of good journalism -- not an alternative. At the presentation, I referred to many blogs as "Loser Generated Content": if the blogs are useless, the bloggers are losers anyway; and if they are useful and not compensated for in a meaningful way, even good-quality bloggers must be losers!
I can't wait to see more credible organisational and business models to honour the better blogs. Of course, you cannot ban or ignore the mass of blogs anymore than you can ban or ignore random letters to the editor. But I plead for sense and sensibility. Surely technology and tagging must have their limits?
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