On “Blogging About Nothing”
This is reply to the Cornell Daily Sun’s news story, Blogging About Nothing. Unfortunately, their site does not currently allow comments due to technical errors, so I am forced to reply here.
You say that “very few” bloggers are experts on what they write, but without evidence. I write about IT; I’m an expert in that field. I read hundreds of technical blogs, all from experts and leaders in their fields.
You inarticulately write that “there is money in these blogs.” Blogs are publishing entities–there is not money in the blogs, but in their readership. It’s not fair to claim that making money is an impure motive for writing a blog, unless you want to include all mainstream media as well. The New York Times is plastered with ads. Every news channel runs expensive video commercials. Being paid, I think, is an incentive to do better work. And, in the world of blogging, those paid the most are the ones attracting the most readers, and therefore doing the best work.
You write that the popularity of blogging is forcing news media to change their tactics. That’s not a problem; it’s evolution and selection pressure. If we can obsolete news, that makes us better suited to the public need for information.
You write that news stories about James Kim were inaccurately fact checked when they suggested that Google Maps may have mislead his family. Even though there’s circumstantial evidence that the family did not use Google Maps, the route it planned was identical to the route they may have followed using paper maps. So, bloggers who wrote about a Google maps connection were actually more daring than traditional media, who probably dropped the stories in the face of legal pressure.
For more, go read Christian Montoya’s response which addresses more fundamentals than the particular points I’m interested in.
Cornell Daily Sun: Dead in the Ether
I had planned to write about the redesign of the Cornell Daily Sun online, but held off until now. Their current feature seems to be some kind of exotic hard-to-get “tease” when you try and read their stories:
As a new feature, it seems like the online branch of the Cornell Daily Sun is just a home page. They even gave up on their old/new design in favor of trying to recreate their old site after complaints from readers. The problem with the Sun online is that they’re using Drupal without sufficient Drupal-oriented staff. Drupal’s a terrible and complex beast to use on this kind of small project. A homegrown system, or another CMS, would have probably served them much better.
Someone (I can’t remember who but it might be here) said that the Cornell Daily Sun’s newspaper is uselessly fulfilling needs that they could better meet online. And, we can clearly see that their online paper is dead in the ether. Therefore, the Cornell Daily Sun shouldn’t exist?
The New Cornell Blogs
You’ve probably noticed that Cornell’s now hosting student blogging projects. They’re running (for the technically inclined) an out-of-date version of Wordpress 2.0.3, using some minor customization, and without mod_rewrite turned on. It’s a bit sad that they’re trying to reinvent and rebrand the services that Wordpress.com already offers, but for a CU hosted blogging project, it’s probably a good start.
The Prez is quite critical of the content of the blogs, most of which deals with verbose, mundane details of each of the official bloggers’ lives. Caroline responds and says, “If you want a little dose of what it means to be a regular old student here, I hope that my blog will fit the bill.” While there is at least dialog going on now in the online Cornell blogging community, what Cornell actually did was create a migration program for personal online journals.
Now, instead of publishing the mindless details of their private lives for the consumption of their close friends on livejournal, Cornell University has nominated them public spokesmen to share their private lives with everyone! Reading over their last forty entries, the content seems to be about on the same level of insight and quality as the median of Livejournal, Myspace, and Xanga. Of all the posts I encountered, there was only one I approved of in any way, and only insofar as it at least included pictures to go along with the personal flow-of-life writing: Collegetown is so far away.
The Cornell Daily Sun (currently dying on the web), wrote a piece about this. In it, some editor wrote:
The applicant pool was limited only to students who already promote the Big Red on a regular basis. Only those who serve as campus tour guides, members of the Cornell Tradition or Undergraduate Admissions employees were eligible for the job.
The short of it is that the Cornell University Student Blogging Project is just a watered down PR machine written by a gang of unfocused novice bloggers.
