Tom Zeller's most recent foray in to the blogosphere, A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip, graced the pages of the Sunday Times, yesterday. Nick Denton reprised the same sort of blog revolution antihype that Gabby Darbyshire (colleague of Denton) and Jason Calcanis (of Weblogsinc) provided us at Les Blog (see here and here).

Tom Zeller

At a time when media conferences like "Les Blogs" in Paris two weeks ago debate the potential of the form, and when BusinessWeek declares, as it did on its May 2 cover, that "Blogs Will Change Your Business," Mr. Denton is withering in his contempt. A blog, he says, is much better at tearing things down - people, careers, brands - than it is at building them up. As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it this way: "Give me a break."

"The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe," he said. "They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed."

I guess thousands of dedicated bloggers -- who are having a profound impact on society, business, and politics -- are really not a revolution, Nick. We're just something else recycled, right? And I guess we are working at tearing things down? I thought we were working to bring people together, but we might be challenging the mainstream media, just a leetle bit, and their step-children who are adopting the forms of blogging but nothing else.

It's like Doc Searls says: Metaphors are everything. If you look at the social media revolution (yes, it is a revolution, Nick) as just an extension of the "online media as content" metaphor, then it really looks that way. It's much more comfortable for the advertisers, who really, really want it to be true. It's simpler in the management of "editorial staff" who view themselves as employees toiling by the post, word, or hour. And it may even be simpler in the interaction with the wide, wide world, who are used to being treated as "consumers" and having little or no interaction with those in charge of "content".

If you want to view blogging as just another set of pipes pushing content to couch potatoes, then that's how it will look to you. However, if you approach it as a renaissance of inquiry and commentary, with citizen journalists engaging with others to expand the range and depth of discourse of the key issues of our times, well, then everything looks very, very different. Of course that perspective challenges the industrial media models, and poses an unsettling series of challenges for many. Advertisers, traditional media companies, mainstream journalists, and the average online denizen will be forced -- sooner or later -- to rethink and then rework their role in the information ecosystem. And that might be uncomfortable, hard, and even dangerous.

Zeller also quotes me in the piece, suggesting that the antihype is just that:

But others have begun to wonder if the brand itself [of Gawker Media and other neo-industrial media companies] is a form of compromise. Stowe Boyd, president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs turn blogs into commodities, churned out for a fee, owned by an overlord and underwritten by advertisers.

"They're pursuing a very clear agenda and they've done very well with that," Mr. Boyd said of Gawker. "But they're just an old media company in new media clothes, and I still maintain that they are missing part of the point."

The point, Mr. Boyd said, is that blogging is unique because of its spontaneity and individualism, and that bloggers, like dancers and sculptors, are most interesting because they are "pursuing their muse."

The editors on Gawker are talented, entertaining and informative, Mr. Boyd said, but also indistinguishable from any freelance writer, with no ownership of what they produce. "These people are hirelings," he said. "What they are cranking out are the 700 words they signed on to produce."

The neo-industrial media types would have you believe that what is happening in the blogosphere is nothing new, just a lowered cost structure and a slightly loosened editorial policy. Bull. Blogging -- despite the fact that the Neos can take the technology platform of blogs and use it in that way -- can be, and is, in general, much more than that.

And, apropos of my recent rant about mainstream journalists seeking to take the discussion about blogging into their own hands (see Watching The Watchers), Zeller has a deft touch with the use of journalistic techniques to get a message across, without ever explicitly saying what he believes. He opens with Denton's positioning this all as a tempest in a teapot, just business as usual. Then I come is as the counterpoint, suggesting that there is something more to blogging than neo-industrial journalism: namely, art and activism. And then, he closes with Denton's (and perhaps his own) final message:

SO, onward goes the nonrevolution. "If you take the amount of attention that has been devoted in the last year to Web logs as a business and something that's going to change business and compare that with the real effect and the real money, it's totally disproportionate," Mr. Denton said, "in the same way all the coverage of the Internet in the late 90's was out of whack.

"There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company's marketing problem, and they're not," he added. "It's Internet media. It's just the latest iteration of Internet media."

So, just in case you were wondering, the Antihype Wars have begun in earnest. And now, with august authorities like the New York Times weighing in (at least it seems so to me) on the side of the pooh-poohers, we have a third spectral presence hovering over the debate within the blogosphere between the neo-industrialists like Denton, Darbyshire, and Calcanis, on one hand, and the social media advocates, on the other.

The Times and other traditional, mainstream media outlets will argue that they are not taking sides: they are objective, and merely reporting what others say, as in this case, where Zeller never steps into the first person about his opinion. (In fact, he is only in the first person when relating the context for the interview with Denton.)

Still, my sense of the piece is that you are meant to be left with a message: blogging is a non-revolution, business as usual, hohum, yawn. In a hundred cocktail parties across America, I can imagine people discussing blogs, and repeating that message: "Its a non-revolution... After all, that's what I read in the Times!"