Dan Farber ran into his friend Dave Winer at the this past week and they discussed/reflected on blogging ten years on.  If you think about it, blogging has come a long way.  Did it take longer than the forming of the Dot Com bubble?  Were we all just a bit wary of pushing it too far?  I think so.  Of course blogging evolved with the web, so it isn’t really fair to say that blogging lagged behind, now is it?

Within a decade blogging has became mainstream, by virtue of the fact that bloggers are highly influential in forming public opinions, although not necessarily canonical truths. Every entity, from newspapers and political campaigns to corporate executives and PR pros, has adopted blogging as a communications medium, many from a defensive posture. So-called citizen journalists and notions of participatory journalism are reshaping, in fits and starts, how news is gathered and disseminated.

Dan goes on to discuss a new book by Andrew Keen called “The Cult of the Amateur”:

He posits that citizen journalists don’t have the resources to provide reliable news, lacking the filters of traditional media, and that the hordes of amateur journalists often distort the news. In the introductory chapter of his book, Andrew writes:

…instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys [Internet users]–many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins–are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.

Andrew of course isn’t wrong about the noise to signal ratio problem and issues related to establishing trust, professional standards or creating a more safe online environment for kids. On the other hand, his elitist stance stance on the digital forest of mediocrity isn’t a solution to filtering out the noise or even a possibility.
Yeah that’s harsh stuff.  Nothing we haven’t heard before, of course.  Just like any mass medium there are going to be good publications (if we consider each blog as a publication) and bad.  We all shudder at the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution when everyone thought they could produce a newsletter.  See how much free clip art and different fonts they could squeeze into a few pages.  Yeah, well we survived that and we’ll survive this too.  Dan’s summation is the best capper to the discussion:

The genie is out of the bottle. It’s not a battle to the death of mainstream media versus the blogosphere. Over time, better filters and search mechanisms; measures of authority and trust; and natural selection will improve the noise to signal ratio, potentially for every individual’s preferences, and change perceptions about what constitutes mainstream media.
Source: » Reflections on the first decade of blogging | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

 This is a process, an evolution, an adaptation.  And I think it’s going pretty well so far.  Hmm, I wonder what the blogosphere will be like as a teenager?

Technorati tags: decade of blogging, Dan Farber, Dave Winer, Andrew Keen, evolution of media