The future of blogs

Apologies for the absence of any new content on these pages in recent weeks - the pressures of a new job (rewarding, but nonetheless busy) and a domestic situation that can only be described as opaque have meant that time is short. Normal service should hopefully be resumed at the beginning of next month when I move into a more permanent form of accommodation.

In the meantime, here's a link to an interesting article from the Sunday Times about what blogs could represent in the brave new (media) world that the 21st century heralds...

Within days, much of the blogosphere had declared, from the distance of several thousand miles, that we were witnessing an “intifada”; there was even talk of France being on the verge of civil war. When the wicked MSM failed to go along with this hypothesis — largely because it couldn’t find any evidence — the reaction among some bloggers was to suspect “another MSM cover-up”. The notion that the disturbances might have been linked to unemployment or racial discrimination was dismissed as just one of those sappy liberal myths.

Eventually, the “intifada” hysteria did abate. But I was still struck by how fiercely some people wanted to cling to conspiracy theories even when there were few supporting facts. The absence of conventional editorial gate-keeping — one of the great advantages of blogs — also has the effect of creating an echo-chamber effect. Newspapers and TV reporters succumb too, of course, but bloggers are not immune.

Read it all here