The Ubiquitous Blog

Chapter 7

Safko, The Social Media Bible

Will blogs become the newspapers of the online age? They certainly are ubiquitous. Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish is my favorite, and sometimes it begins to approach the breadth of a newspaper’s news and commentary because its content includes a variety of news and comment. Sullivan’s blog posts are prominently featured, of course, but The Daily Dish also  it serves as an aggregator of other bloggers and op ed commenters. Sullivan links to them and also comments on them. Then there are the regular features: various awards, both positive and negative, for public utterances or actions; a photo feature titled “The View From Your Window;” and more.

Of course, Sullivan’s blog doesn’t have a sports report, classified ads, or stock quotes, so it will never completely replace a newspaper’s functions. But it provides a surprisingly large variety of comment and news.

As a one-time newspaperman, to me one of the most compelling blog-related questions is whether more than a handful of people around the world are able to make a living by blogging.

Interestingly, I read a lot of newsgroups in the mid-1990s. It was a good way to keep up with information and comment in several subjects I was interested in. I hadn’t considered them a forerunner of blogs, but the space for airing opinions and the conversations they facilitated certainly are like today’s blogs.

To me, the key phrase in this entire chapter is on page 146, where Safko makes reference to “the online global conversation.” That captures the essence of blogs, and to some extent the essence of social networking, in a very few words. Framing what we’re doing as part of the “online global conversation” will help frame some of the new issues for me, I think.