The second session today at WordCamp featured John Dvorak and Om Malik, it was the eternal blog/journalism debate:
Here are a few choice tidbits from their conversation:
- Why not link? Why waste time/space describing something when you can link?
- Many traditional journalists don't like blogs because they're so annoying, they're always sniping at traditional media.
- Papers that don't allow their reporters to link almost say, "We don't want people to go somewhere else and realize how bad we are by comparison.
- There is this assumption that countries like India and other areas that don't get blogs, Om said the majority of his Indian readers are using mobile devices.
- Om says to be a successful blogger, you need to engage the people that comment.
- People who comment are often smart people that say smart things.
Visitor Comments
OK, so first off let me admit that I have so very little faith in John C. Dvorak's knowledge that I usually skip anything that mentions his name.
That said, I did want to respond to this point:
"- Why not link? Why waste time/space describing something when you can link?"
This is classic "I'm a tech junkie, why isn't everybody" thinking. I'm all for linking but it's not a silver bullet for content creation. Not everybody is going to want to click a link to see your real meaning, and may be reading your content in order to get a synopsis. Sure, sometimes it's great to see the bigger context of what your content refers to, but most of the time, most people are going to want the quick overview to understand what the hell you're talking about.
Posted by: Jake McKee | July 23, 2007 12:06 PM
Interesting and certainly pertains to the new realities on the two very different types of information dispensers
Posted by: Robert | July 31, 2007 7:12 PM