> although that book looks pretty interesting. might not have answered
> your
> question, but it did give me a book to add to the to-read list!
Hi Shag-
I'd also recommend Lovink's new book "Zero Comments":
>
The opening chapter on blogging is well worth the read. It's expanded from this essay, I believe:
<http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-lovink-en.html>
"What CNN, newspapers, and radio stations the world over have failed to do – namely to integrate open, interactive messages from their constituencies – blogs do for them. To "blog" a news report doesn't mean that the blogger sits down and thoroughly analyzes the discourse and circumstances, let alone checks the facts on the ground. To blog merely means to quickly point to news fact through a link and a few sentences that explain why the blogger found this or that factoid interesting or remarkable, or is disagrees with it.
Blog entries are often hastily written personal musings, sculptured around a link or event. In most cases, bloggers simply do not have the time, skills, or financial means for proper research. There are collective research blogs working on specific topics, but these are rare. What ordinary blogs create is a dense cloud of "impressions" around a topic. Blogs will tell you if your audience is still awake and receptive. Blogs test. They allow you to see whether your audience is still awake and receptive. In that sense we could also say that blogs are the outsourced, privatized test beds, or rather unit tests[9] of the big media.
The boundaries between the mediasphere and the blogsphere are fluid. A detailed social analysis would, most likely, uncover a grey area of freelance media makers moving back and forth. From early on, journalists working for "old media" ran blogs. So how do blogs relate to independent investigative journalism? At first glance, they look like oppositional, or potentially supplementary practices. Whereas the investigative journalist works months, if not years, to uncover a story, bloggers look more like an army of ants contributing to the great hive called "public opinion". Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports."
Best, Charles