Ed Driscoll offers an inadvertent, libertarian counterpoint to yesterday’s assertion of new media impotence (at least, on the right) offered by Steve Graham.
Compare and contrast.
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I concur with Senor Driscoll.
I was a little worried about the whole “sick man of the Rockies” thing, especially with the new hosting, but this is a Good Day at Protein Wisdom.
Your comment on Mr. Graham’s thread was brilliant. Which of course, was the perfect reflection of my thoughts after the first few paragraphs.
No. Actually, my thoughts were, Steve, WTF?
It’s a good thing some bloggers feel so important!
It’s too bad that Big Media is ruining everything!
Power to the People!
Free Ice Cream for All!
And Pie!
I think SondraK had the best comment at Steve’s site, that some people blog just because they like to do it, and occasionally you can expand your social/business network through the blogosphere. I’ve had several opportunities to help and be helped by people I’ve met through blogs. Yes, we have our Killian memo moments, but nothing ever done on the blogosphere is ever really that earth shattering.
I like to read Protein Wisdom because he uses swear words and tells us about his filthy neighborhood with the naked hobos beating off all the time.
But that’s just me.
Having criticized Graham’s piece, I would note that Driscoll’s piece, while more close to my views, is not with out its flaws. The dealth of the Overculture is greatly exaggerated. PJM may (or may not) work as an ad network, but its larger ambitions are generally unrealized. HotAir — which I said yersterday could be a forerunner of the future — has cut back on its original video production. And I’m sure Graham would argue that the Right/Libertarian blogosphere has not produced anything resembling the apprenticeship system Driscoll posits.
Also, I would note the notion of “objective” journalism is not as much a product of the advent of radio as Driscoll suggests. It may be partially correct, but progressivism was at least as big an influence.
“Just as the Big Three car manufacturers, with a once-monolithic hold on American consumers, seemed unaware that the public wanted a wider choice of cars (until Japan listened and responded)”
Overall I liked Driscoll’s piece, but this bit bothers me. I know this is the accepted version of What Went Down!, but it is not accurate and unfair to American manufacturers. American car companies had delivered a globally unprecedented choice of cars for decades, including small, economy models that were largely ignored. Americans wanted three sizes: Big, Bigger and Fucking Huge. Then OPEC happened and suddenly small cars were in demand, and the Japanese had a huge head start since that is all they had ever built. It had little to do with anyone being unaware, it had to do with a sudden, drastic shift in demand and a supplier who was already in place.
Now, what was the Graham thing about? Zzzzzzzzzz
And, Ayn Rand’s face give me the jeebies, no matter what pic I see of her. The OVERCULTURE! LESS POWER TO THE OVERCULTURE! Sounds hip/revolutionary.
Come on: We reads the bloggers because the main-streamers don’t report the news; but they are doing such an amazing job of parodying themselves these days, it takes less explanation to unravel. These days watching the main media is like getting a front-row seat for a daily meme train wreck. And, hence the slowdown in conservative blogging, if really there is one.
#6 B Moe, another factor with cars was that consumers got tired of spending their first six months of ownership running their brand new vehicles back and forth to the dealer to have things fixed. That “break in” period was also when you discovered all the stuff that didn’t work or was assembled wrong. Believe me, it was a revelation to buy a new car and not have to darken the dealer’s door until the first scheduled oil change.
I don’t know about that, we never could afford new cars.
It would have been a revelation to me for someone else to fix it, lol.
Okay, Glenn just linked Steve. End of the world as we know it, or what?
definitely fewer than one hundred people, and maybe as few as twenty people, actually decided what constituted national news in the United States
And herein lies the problem with the MSM. It went from thousands of scrabbling reporters with their notepads and pencil stubs and was winnowed down to an elite few, because of reporting resources.
Could that happen to the blogosphere?
No it’s the Overthruster, doesn’t anyone remember Buckaroo Banzai. Curiously, the
flux capacitor was the same size and shape as Buckaroo’s flux capacitor; an archetypal
‘ghost in the machine’ reference by Zemeckis. There’s a simpler explanation why
say Olbermann, (even though he gets a fraction of the ratings of any other cable broadcast)Michael Moore, Cyndi Sheehan,
Sharpton, get imminently more exposure than those on the right. There imperfection
are down the Winston’s Smith memory chute.
Take Marcos “Moulitsas’ Kos, please, what does the public really know about him; he’s
a former soldier who served in the Gulf War
(not) who’s against the war in Iraq, and raises money for democrats; what don’t they
know about him “his signature statement on
his blog; re; the fallen Blackwater
contractors in Fallujah as they were skinned alive over the bridge like something out of the movie ‘Predator’
; “Screw Um, They’re Mercenaries” that was his reaction. When Harold Ford debated Kos
on Meet the Press, all Harold could retort
was “with Respect, your site has said some
despicable things; no screen capture by
Russert. Michael Moore is never really called to account for the fact that he’s made up every ‘fact’ of his career. From not meeting with Roger Smith in Roger & Me, to misrepresenting a Lockheed satellite office as an outpost of the MIC
in “Bowling for Columbine” to using the footage of battle scarred soldiers to endorse his political statements in “Fahrenheit 9/11” And outside of certain circles, he’s never called to account for stating after 9/11; “Too bad they didn’t hit a Red State that voted for Bush”. MoveOn is almost never scored by using the threat of Iraqi nuclear weapons, as an argument against the Iraq War! Now Bob Dole’s growling “Democrat Wars in 1976, or Fred Thompson playing a neonazi in 1987; that’s will play in the Moebius loop for eternity. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, one of the few times that we’ve been able to capitalize on a Democrat’s prolix verbosity; has become an accusation of slander not unlike McCarthyism.
It’s just such a different medium, d. The most extraordinary and revolutionary thing happens on occasion I think, when Glenn Reynolds links not to a post but to a comment below, and, oddly, I don’t think he realizes this. He is always selling the steak, but the sizzle is the give-and-take of the medium. If you took me out of my hutch and put me on the floor between JG and psychologizer, I would amble in an indecisive circle and then lay down and take a nap I think. Ideas are realer now, with champions in their own voice – a cottage industry, not a factory farm. This was the insight Reynolds was exploring in that book. Am I blathering?
In other words I guess, better to market the experience of the visitors than to market the bloggers, if you’re aiming to grow a blogging network. The tagline, “Bringing you the best in global blogging…” – this is still selling an inherently passive experience.
Just like the MSM.
happyfeet – traditional marketing for the blogosphere was like book marketing for movies – worked great when no one had figured out a better way.
Right, but then the net has revolutionized movie marketing. There are stats on the percentage of visitors to a website that WILL show up at the theater, sliced in all kind of ways. The corollary might be that if a visitor comments on your site, the odds of a return visit increase… how much? I haven’t seen any data, but my hypothesis would be that it’s a greater percentage than return just because they clicked in once and had a good read over lunch at their desk.
This is why I think it’s significant when Reynolds links to a comment… I suspect that there is a rather large contingent of “blog readers” who have rarely or never clicked into a comments thread, and moreso on the right than the left, for obvious reasons.
I’m belaboring this a bit cause I think it’s an oversight in Driscoll’s analysis, which is messed up cause he spends so much time talking about how blogs are differentiated from the MSM, but doesn’t seem to think much about how blog *visitors* are different from the MSM audience.
*visitors to a movie’s website*
Parliament of Clocks
gotta love that phrase!
BMoe
I partially disagree. The Big Three were had grown so insullar by their own success they couldn’t respond to a changed market. It was kinda like Henry Ford’s “You can have any choice of color as long as it’s black”. And as Old Grouch points out, the small-car choices that the Big Three did offer suffered badly in comparison to the tight, efficient Japanese cars. Up to that point, if one wanted a cheap, easy to run, easy to maintain car, one bought a VW bug.
I’m also old enough to remember what a “revolutionary” car it was when Ford introduced the Mustang in 1965 … yet by the time of OPEC gas crisis, it had morphed from a sporty coupe into a V8 big-block muscle car.
If we only had a little cheese to go with that whine we could have a real party! Maybe the ‘dillo would dance..
Ed’s piece isn’t exactly a reply to Steve’s. Ed was talking about the blogosphere in general and the legacy media; Steve was talking about conservative blogs versus progressive blogs.
I posted these comments on a thread at LGF that promptly died and thought they might be appropriate here also.
I know from experience that before the internet it was very time and resource consuming to make a dent in any of the memes spread by the MSM. I’m talking about checking for yourself if a certain meme is factual. Haunting libraries and used/rare bookstores was the usual way of checking a story. Getting out that something spread as factual by the MSM is fake before the connectivity of today was rare, rare, rare. I used to believe back then that the fakes were rare because it was rare to find out about one. Now I wonder if they might be a major part of all we “know” as past news stories. How deep is the memory hole?
The downside of the internet is that fakes are also easier to spread to those not into crosschecking sources and stories or those who overwhelmingly want something to be true even if it isn’t.
For me the old “usenet”, when I was first online, was a wonderful introduction to crosschecking everything said and determining for myself which sources to trust and which were liars and trolls.
Darleen –
IIRC, Detroit’s real lack was a good small engine… they had fine inline sixes, but the package size was still not compact. This was a problem not solved until the 80s.
The Vega was a fine small car, reliable and good handling (obviously grotesquely dated by today’s styling, but what isn’t from the 70s). It Just Didn’t Sell. The Corvair was an excellent car, destroyed by a publicity-hungry Ralph Nader (the car, upon later review, was no less safe than any other from the era). The Pinto was not any more prone to explode than the fullsize pickups made famous in the “rocket engine” Nightline reports, but somebody made a mint of that publicity, too. It’s no surprise the American car makers were a bit paranoid of the press by 1980. :)
Detroit almost instantly gained the reputation for not making small cars, but when it made them, they didn’t sell. This was a combination of “audience expectation” and the auto media’s instantly buying into the “Detroit can’t make small cars” meme, which was already in place in the 70s and cliche by 1980.
Despite most of the people I personally know not being brand loyalists, most people are, and the “small car” market had become primarily Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and VW loyalists, which is one of the reasons a lot of 80s American small cars were simply repackaged Toyotas (Chevrolet), Mitsubishi (Chrysler), or “alliance” cars with borrowed or codesigned engines.
There were very real quality control issues, but they became legendary and larger than life (obviously there were design issues with the “smog era” 1970s engines, the pathetic 1980s diesels, and when legal requirements for paint changed in the 80s). The Chevrolet Nova of the late 80s had a reputation for being a crappy economy car, while the Tercel had a great reputation for reliability. Same car, different badges. The same story held true for many other rebadged cars. I used to have a Consumer Distorts magazine lying around with a review that praised one car and trashed another – they were the same car sans sheetmetal.
For disclosure’s sake, I’ve never owned an American-made car. One was American-badged, but made in Japan (Dodge Stealth TT).
Okay, that’s a long-enough car geek rant for a Saturday. :)
On the auto thing. One perception I had is that when emission controls were coming in, Detroit, especially GM, responded with lawyers and lobbyists while Japan responded with engineers.
You know why I’m just not that into Steve Graham? The same reason I ever read him at all…his funny disgruntled-man act, coupled with observational powers that seem to come from the bottom of a bottle of bitter dregs. All props to his talent, but dark disgruntlement is something I only want in smaller doses every once in awhile. He wants to run with the big dogs and mocks and levels and notes the failures of said bigger dogs to make it clear that he’s been unfairly overlooked, and to convince us this means the entire system is breaking down and not going where it should. I’m getting nowhere I want, he laments; and look, those who got somewhere didn’t get at all where I want, either.
Here’s what Steve, – the system goes where it goes,
It isn’t fair, information flows through channels, is subject to chaotic top-down and bottom up forces, and tends to stay near the same stream-beds because people look for things where they think they will find them. There are all kinds of ways to get an advantage, and sometimes an advantage is a disadvantage, what makes you interesting at all makes you fail, or fail in the way you wished to succeed.
But get this straight – Nobody pissed away the POWER OF THE BLOGOSPHERE, on the right…it’s still there, and in any story, a little David can be the stone in the brain of any number of giants. Or one of the stinging fire ants that gets up in the giant’s underpants.
Mavens and aggregators and comic talents and brilliant writers may step in an out, information will just naturally clump. That’s what it does, that’s why we have brains.
I suppose the Republic may be saved by a more concerted effort to pay attention to Steve, but his discontent at how others of like mind gain personal advantage of or get winnowed out is really a cover for anxiety for himself than the medium or the almighty Right.
The biggest concern I have about the internets, isn’t that someone will use it better than me. I just want to be able to talk on it. As long as that’s as possible for me as anyone else, to talk about what I like or know, or a pleased with or mad about, talent will emerge and recede and information will pass and collect and when there is a powerful message, it will resonate into a big powerful sunami of power wherever it is demanded.
I wonder how an internet would have shaped Detroit’s response to demands for smaller cars.
Memoreeees – In the very early 80’s, I drove a six-cylinder Bobcat (Mercury’s version of the Pinto). It was spiffy, convenient, had fabulous pickup. It survived my notions of how often oil should be changed. I still miss it sometimes.
What a terrific article, I wish I’d written it. It’s what I wanted to write but couldn’t get the data for. I recommend everyone check this out and consider it. The comparison between – say – Michelle Malkin readers and CNN’s viewers was powerful, I had overestimated the numbers and influence that news agency had.
The development of the “objective” media and its calcification was great insight as well.
But CNN’s web audience… I’m too lazy to track down rankings, but they have considerable reach. I don’t have a point really, just that the MSM’s internet efforts are substantial, so I didn’t get the same thing out of Driscoll’s comparison there.
Frank J. has the best response:
Start a lemonade stand and then moan that the titans of industry haven’t recognized your potential and made you a fellow titan? I’d say that was time for a reality check. With something like 87 million blogs out there you’ve got to be pretty special to get anybody but your mom to visit on a regular basis. It’s a pity, but there just aren’t enough dancing ‘dillos to go around.
I was impressed by how he put it: by linking and cross linking, the people you reach on a blog will be far more diverse and broad a segment of the population than the same number of viewers of a television show. Granted, the internet blog reader is a pretty specific individual, but the CNN news viewer is as well.
i think Book Marketing takes more effort compared to e-mail marketing and social media marketing.~`*
sometimes i hate e-mail marketers coz they email me some spammy stuffs’`*