Digging the Power of Conversation
The recent story about Digg and the HD-DVD hack got me thinking about blogging and how it differs from more traditional media.
Cease and desist orders may well keep the details out of the news but they are futile against the wave of public opinion and in this case the threats of legal action against Digg may well prove to be counter productive to the AACS’s cause.
The shear number of people expressing their opinions means that there is little chance for those who want to keep the lid on the HD-DVD hack to do so. You may silence one but can you silence thousands?
Which brings me to why blogs are different from traditional media. While both may be written, that is about all they have in common. Blogs are more like conversations on a global scale where people express and trade opinions. Build upon other peoples ideas or tear them down. It’s not always nice and it’s not always good, but then people aren’t either!
Bloggers may write but their media is more informal like talking and chatting. No amount of force will stop the power of conversation even if it becomes a whisper.
So if you find yourself on the receiving end of the blogger’s wrath you would be well advised to ask yourself what you have done that has caused so many people to feel so strongly against you. They may well have a valid point but then they may not - that’s blogging for you!
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 4th, 2007 at 7:50 am
I didn’t know that interesting story about the “HD-DVD hack digging”. Anyway I still don’t clearly understand how really digg works (how much “human” is there).
May 10th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Blogging differs totally from other medias because each individual blogger can write what he wants. There is nobody who forces him to write about a special topic. Newspapers or television channels always have some people who decide what they want to publish.
May 17th, 2007 at 1:25 am
What really has changed in the past few years is the power of the blog. Major news stories have been broken on blogs. In Toronto, Canada a blog had released a sensitive court order about an upcoming police raid seven days before it happened. Was that journalism or just someone revealing senstive information? Either way with major media outlets all now featuring blogs its impossible to discredit something just by saying-I read that on a blog. In some situations blogs even has more weight/trust than traditional media sources.
May 21st, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I definately agree with you that blogs are a more informal method of creating websites, its one of the aspects i love about blogs allowing a gramtically incorrect me to publish articles of all sorts and subject.
June 12th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I agree with Michael that blogs give more freedom of expression than any other media channel. Still, a blog admin can any time filter the comments and responses wich is correct, but on the other hand can be frustrating for an user interested about a certain subject