I have been thinking about how to share these stories with you for some time now. My friend David Wickenden over at Fleishman Hillard sent this to our attention shortly after this series of articles was published in The Economist on April 20th, 2006.

It is quite simply one of the best pieces of reporting I have found on the bigger picture we are referencing with Beyond Blogging. I still don’t know how to boil it down for you, so let me first say that I highly recommend you find the time to sit down and read each of them all the way through. I could probably write 2,000 words on each of the articles, so it is best if I let them mostly speak for themselves.  The articles provide an excellent, non-alarmist perspective as to what all this stuff means and an understanding of how it affects your profession.

• Among the Audience
• It’s the links, Stupid
• Compose Yourself
• The Wiki Principle
• Heard on the Street
• Wonders of the Metaverse
• The Gazillion Dollar Question
• What Sort of Revolution

I would really like to sit and spend some time with the authors of this piece to dig even deeper. The inclusion of the broader historical perspective adds a tremendous level of understanding the current media ‘revolution’ in context. For instance, I have been watching as the old guard of Mainstream Media has responded to the Blogging phenomenon with scorn and disdain, portraying Bloggers as not only unskilled amateurs, but as hacks with a score to settle against others.

My experience has been completely the opposite - most Bloggers I know are more concerned with conveying the truth and are quick to correct themselves when shown to be wrong. Personally, I am not much of a researcher, but I know not to quote someone improperly as has happened to Todd Tweedy recently in his dealings with Tom Wasserman from Brandweek.  In the end, professional ethics come down to the individual’s interpretation - so my point is that both amateurs and professionals are human, we all make mistakes.
Some of the more important elements of the lead article tie in directly with some of my previous posts for this Blog:

“Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating. Some will be making money from the content they create; others will not and will not mind, because they have other motives.”

“As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades.”

“David Weinberger says that Mainstream Media ‘don’t get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations’. That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.”

“[Barry] Diller is confident that participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry. ‘Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,’ he says. ‘Talent is the new limited resource.’ […] ‘What an ignoramus!’ says Jerry Michalski.”

What is lost on Barry is how much of a training ground this is for the next Spielberg, the next Jennings, the next Crichton. What you don’t get in the ranks of most media organizations is the chance to really practice the craft and experiment with media - there is little tolerance for risk or failure. This is exactly what the Blogging revolution is providing - free training for the media stars of tomorrow as well as a new distribution channel for the stars of today.

Quality of production is a discriminating factor for many consumers, but the quality of the content can come from a poorly delivered. The fact that the story is being told somewhere rather than not being toldd at all is what really matters. With the proper tools for creation and discovery, every story that matters will find its audience, no matter how small that audience might be.

This is the real power of going Beyond Blogging.

What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed.

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, New Media