Blog Overkill (from: Renee Blodgett)
http://www.downtheavenue.com/2005/01/blog_overkill.html
Slate has a fabuous “Blog Overkill” article, that talks about the danger of saturation of a new technology early on……..simply too much of it.
Frankly, while I love to blog, have three blog related clients and understand the value not only from a social cultural perspective but have already started to see some fabulous ROI examples from clients’ customers, I have been wondering the same thing….
Jack Shafer writes that the alleged divide between the old media and this new whippersnapper media of blogs has never seemed real to him.
Other interesting excerpts worth referencing here that really hit home:
“If media visionaries underestimate the adaptive skills of the old media to imitate, acquire (as Slate did kausfiles and as the Washington Post Co. did Slate), and innovate, they also tend to underestimate their own abilities to take over the old media from within.”
and
“The danger of fetishizing a new technology (the Porta-Pak) or a new media wrinkle (the blog) is obvious: In the rush to define the new new thing and celebrate its wonders, the human tendency to oversell kicks in. Am I the only one who remembers how John Perry Barlow, drunk on the Web nine years ago, issued his ridiculous “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace?”
More: “In hyperbolic fashion, Barlow wrote, “We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” Lenin subscribed to this sort of technological moonbeamism when he declared that socialism plus electricity would equal communism, and we know where that led.”