Build Your Own Boeing
The term “taking the Boeing” is blog talk for being bought out by the ever clueless MSM. Usage: Andrew Sullivan has just taken the Boeing with his deal at Time Magazine.
Today’s launch of Open Source Media Inc. including our very own Daiman Penny , Pieter Dorsman (shared with Holland) and Angry in the Great White North (and good on you guys!) is both exciting and a bit of a non-event. The excitement lies in Charles Johnson of LGF and Roger Simon herding the cats on the rightish side of the blogosphere into what may well be an answer to the wildly, if improbably, successful Huffington Post.
The non-event is the remarkably 2002 feel to the whole thing. When there are sites like Memeorandum and digg competing for attention it would have made some sense to have a bit more of a W2.0 feel to the whole thing.
Now, buried in the site is the nugget that, on the 14th, OSM completed a 3.5 million dollar venture round which suggests that the bills will be paid. What is not obvious is how hiring the people Glenn Reynolds links to amounts to a business plan.
I was asked a few days ago to name my blogfather and the technical answer to that is Andrew Sullivan because reading his blog I figured I could do much the same sort of thing. But the blogger who has influenced me most and whose departure for animie blogging left a huge hole in my ways of understanding the world is Steven den Beste. He is not impressed,
When I look down the passenger list about to board the the borg cube, it’s a little bit worrying how many of my favorite blogs are included. This could become a new single point of failure, depending on contractual obligations and how the corporation ends up getting managed. None of those details have been widely revealed yet; today’s dog-and-pony show was all about feeling good and getting publicity.
What will happen to these people when they are assimilated? Ace of Space HQ, Austin Bay, Baldilocks, Belmont Club, Captain’s Quarters, Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Briefing, Dean’s World, Donald Sensing, Ed Driscoll, Instapundit, Jawa Report, LGF, Live from Brussels, Manolo’s Shoe Blog, Medienkritik, Michelle Malkin, Patterico, Samizdata, Tim Blair, Vodkapundit
That’s about two thirds of the blogs I read regularly. Hewitt and Jarvis and Pejman and Pixy and the guys at Silent Running and ChicagoBoyz are still free, but will they in their turn surrender to the borg?
If this turns out to be a portal plus an advertising syndicate, then that will be fine. But if it’s more than that, then I’m worried. For instance, if all those people end up paying less attention to their current sites in order to provide more material for the portal, that’s very bad news. The portal won’t have the same flavor and the same freedom that those blogs have now.
den beste
What seems to have happened is that various flavours in blogging have felt issolated in their independence. On the left there is the shelter of the Daily Kos in the States or Rabble in Canada. On the right just the chill wind of independence.
The freedom den Beste mentions is precisely the reason why people blog. But the lure of actually making some money doing what you like doing, the possiblity of having a little more status and a few more readers, the invitation to a New York launch - seductive as Hell. And, there is no reason at all to suppose that OSM is going to curtail the freedom of the people they have selected. In a sense the selection pretty much assures the opinions will have a consistency and a position which people of a certain political ilk will find comforting.
Which is all good. But a little sad. Something like the closing of the frontier and the arrival of the railway. Before long the high plains riders and the outlaws will be townsmen and solid citizens.
Or not. While the lads are having a few cocktails in New York there is another generation of web savvy, politically able, technically competent people making another web. In fact, they may well be creating what the web should have been all along if only it had had the bandwidth. On this web being on an A-list is interesting but not terribly important; being quick and understanding that the web is not an online clone of MSM but rather a different medium altogether is important in W2.0 land.
OSM is poised to pump a few more bullets into the twitching carcass of the NYT and the LA Times and network TV and the generally tired and declining magazines which were household names thirty years ago. W2.0, on the other hand, is getting ready to replace the old media with the new.
If I had seen more of that sense of the new in the launch of OSM I might have been more excited. Of course things may improve. But Memeorandum is in my tool bar, OSM isn’t.
Written by jay on November 17th, 2005 with
1 comment.
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#1. November 17th, 2005, at 11:35 PM.
I find this depressing not because of the end of importance of individual blogs but because of the end of the understanding of the critical unimportance of individual blogs. If blogs were anything they are a source of the ability to trap a comment and have that trapping noted in Google rankings. For example right now I have inadvertently become a hub of discontent over CBC’s Freestyle. I wrote little of note other than I knew the host as a pal back I undergrad but for whatever reason am #1 on Google. You add a few more posts like that and I become a media pundit - except I am not. I am merely one of those little whirlpools in the river of the internet that collects the thoughts and attention of others. Similarly, my masterful work on A Good Beer Blog ranks above or below the wikipedia post on “beer” as well as the homepage of Miller brewing. But I am just one wee voice in a topic that actually has few voices but a lot of interested readers. The above is what is reasonably described as a Web 1.0 description.
What does the event of amalgamating under OSM do for that sort of voice? Gets it maybe a little of the change found in the pockets of foolish VCs who never heard of last wave of fools in 1999. It also removes them from the Google rank as the borg will only count as one hit for any of the authors. The voice as a result has become muted. That I think is what Web 2.0 will be about. Layers of useless intervention between my receiption of your thought. And waste. But get in on the party now as long as you know what is happening and you want to go for the ride. It may take a couple years but the emperors lack of clothes will be noted soon enough.