Written by "Billmon", the author of Whiskey Bar, online at www.billmon.org.
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In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers — those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy — is gaining larger audiences and greater influence. But the passion and energy that made blogging such a potent alternative to the corporate-owned media are in danger of being lost, or driven back to the outer fringes of the Internet.
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Media exposure, in turn, is intensifying an existing trend toward a "winner take all" concentration of audience share. Even before blogs hit the big time, Web stats showed the blogosphere to be a surprisingly unequal place, with a relative handful of blogs — say, the top several hundred — accounting for the lion's share of all page hits.
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That world of inspired amateurs still exists, but it's rapidly being overshadowed by the blogosphere's potential for niche marketing. Ad dollars are flowing into the blogosphere. And naturally, most are going to the A-list blogs. As media steer readers toward the top blogs, the temptation to sell out to the highest bidder could become irresistible, and the possibility of making it in the marketplace as an independent blogger increasingly theoretical.
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As blogs commercialize, they are tied ever closer to the mainstream media and its increasingly frivolous news agenda. The political blogosphere already has a bad habit of chasing the scandal du jour. This election season, that's meant a laser-like focus on such profound matters as the mysteries of Bush's National Guard service or whether John Kerry deserved his Vietnam War medals. Meanwhile, more unsettling (and important) stories — like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or the great Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction snipe hunt — quietly disappear down the media memory hole.
Not here at DU!
more here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-billmon26sep26,1,7984265.story?coll=la-news-commentInteresting that DU has had little exposure in the corporate media "celebration" of blogging. DU has more traffic than all the blogs that have begun to be mentioned in the corporate media (see this DU thread for details:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2415351 )
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