大象传媒

There has been much criticism in various blogging communities about the slow pace of change from traditional media companies when it comes to blogs and consumer generated media.

I personally don't think that traditional media companies have been all that slow. The 大象传媒's recent moves are one example. And also from my experience in researching corporate blogging over the last three years, I've come to see that companies dip their toe into the world of social media and blogging slowly. SUN, Microsoft, IBM and others took time to learn how to work in this new culture.

It鈥檚 easy to get impatient with those people who have not caught up. But I think that traditional media is rapidly changing. As first test pilot projects roll out, you will see more use of blogging and social media culture and techniques by traditional media companies.

Its only that we are in this transition period where consultants are often ahead of the curve when compared with journalists in the use of these new technologies that we see such criticism and hence a lack of trust. Once media starts using blogging designs for websites traditional media companies will wonder why they did not move faster.

The culture of blogging is about transparency; the opportunity lies in being more open. The threat comes from being more open. Every media company will have to figure out for themselves what works for them, their audience and their business model. But I know that journalist will just not be quite the same in the next few years.

Once you have dipped your toe into the new culture of collaborative writing. Teamwork writing is something that will influence mainline articles. I see all of this as a huge opportunity for traditional media. And I believe many media companies will embrace it quickly.

Recently, the Economist did a report on New Media and was quoted as saying that approximately 30 million blogs exist. However, in my opinion, the roughly 30 million people who have blogs are what constitute the majority of the readers and commenters on blogs. That is, blogs have created an insular community that does not reach a main stream crowd.

Is the solution to blogs and 'new media' to gaining popularity is commercialization, ease of use, or ease of access? For now, I think the technology involved with blogging (no matter how simplistic it may seem for some of us) is the primary inhibitor to expanding the readers of blogs as a primary tool for news, information, and entertainment.

We media seems to be the significant gathering of the month. However, I think that understanding the workings of the media today take more than industry leaders and business venturers talking about them and hyping their latest gadgets. I think that issues of the day about the media relate more to ethics, democracy, pluralism, citizenship than strategic pursuits of business, profit and capitalism.

'We Media' sounds like a tremendous project; engaging in the aims of dynamically engaging in 'discourse' and extending the realm of the 'public sphere' is a more crucial goal in the current social and political climate, domestically and internationally.

The parallel themes of trust and connecting people are especially apposite, given the concerns in the net community over uneven structures of debate and communication, which evinced in the creation of projects such as Manifest Essay Competition- which endeavour to utilise the arena or 'community' of the internet to create a dynamic forum for the advancement of critical, non-mainstream intellectual perspectives.

Ah! The "Media" have discovered that they don't indeed control some of the things that occur. They are would-be blognoscenti, desperately flailing about in order to bleed money from the blogoisie. I have nothing but contempt for these folks and the grubbers who organize such putative "events."

I believe there are two main factors that affect the notion of trust in and between the mainstream media and the blog:

The first factor is the major difference between the mainstream media and the blog. Where the media is answerable to an editor (who in turn is answerable to the dictates of a government or a corporation), the blogger is not constrained in his writing to please anyone.

The second is, that while professional journalists have the grammar and syntax which make their writing sound good on paper, many bloggers do not have this kind of education. There are some very shrewd writings by bloggers out there, but some are emotional as they show their disgust with government and the corporate world in ways unbecoming of journalistic writing.

The notion of trust is somehow prejudiced by these two factors. How can you trust the media when the "truth" is transformed? How can you regard a blogger's opinion as thoughtful and incisive, when it is coached in an unsuitable manner?

When these two issues are resolved, there could be more trust in both forms of news writing.

I thought that the blog sites were owned by the big media companies .... Murdoch etc. They own the rights for all the material inserted into a blog.

The real issue here is not the power of blogs as a news dissemination platform, more who owns the copyright for the text, images and sound.