The World Leaders Notice Blogging

Whiskey Bar on the Blog Session at the WEF

...after watching the steady deterioration of the profession over the past ten years or so, I have no patience for such self-serving crap. Yeah, there's a lot of misinformation and just plain nonsense on the web, but a mass media that gives us Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage on a regular basis, and that devotes more coverage to Michael Jackson's legal problems than the Iraq War, isn't in a position to lecture anyone about standards. The truth is that the blogs are getting better and better, and the mass media is getting worse and worse. If the credibility lines haven't crossed yet they soon will.

The fact remains that much of the content on news-oriented blogs -- like this one -- is lifted from the mainstream press. According to one of the blog tracking services, the sites most frequently linked to by Whiskey Bar are The Washington Postand The New York Times, and that isn't likely to change soon.

This creates a classic free-rider problem.

Just the fact that blogging showed up on the agenda at Davos this year is probably a bad sign. I can't shake the suspicion that the golden age of blogging is almost over -- that the corporate machine is about to swallow it, digest it, and regurgitate it as bland, non-threatening pablum. Our brief Summer of Love may be nearing an end.