The axe I want to grind in this show is the rising antihype about blogging. Even though blogging was dubbed word of the year by American Heritage -- principally as an outgrowth of the high profile that bloggers got at the national republican and democratic conventions -- there's a rash of blog-bashing going on. I wrote about this last week, as a response to an antiblog article at Darwin, where, strangely enough, I used to write a monthly column on social tools, called Social Commentary. The article was entitled "Enough with Blogging Already," written by Graeme Thickins, someone I have never encountered before. In my conclusion, I noted:
"Graeme has run out all the classic parts of the Wet Blanket List: if this was important we'd be doing it already, there are better ways to do this, this is just the old stuff in new wrappings, the establishment (in this case, the old-line Communications folks) thinks this new stuff is dumb, etc. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions points out that the emergence of any new paradigm -- one that invalidates a previous worldview -- will be subjected to these sorts of attacks, independent of the actual issues that differentiate the new from the old. And, of course, those that espouse the new paradigm will be personally discredit6ed and attacked by the establishment.
I don't know who Graeme Thickins is, or what he does, but he is playing the role here of an advocate of the Media Counter-Reformation. I expect that those arguing against blogging will get increasingly strident as more businesses adopt blogging as a core element of their communications plans, and the old ways start to fall down. Jobs will be lost, careers ended, and money that historically flowed through old line PR, communications firms, and media companies will find new channels into other pockets."
At the Les Blogs conference in Paris, I decided to ask some of the other speakers about their thoughts on this subject, to see if they had started to encounter this rising tide of invective against blogs and their writers.
