There's a good summation of
The Guardian's Changing Media Summit, which was held yesterday,
here.
It's full of interesting thoughts on the future of community interaction in publishing, and the roles of blogs and podcasts.
As mentioned in the pages of Estates Gazette last week, government minister David Miliband is now blogging. The site has been live since earlier in the week
Interestingly, this isn't a personal effort, it's part of the ODPM site.
The world of mainstream media firm blogging doesn't stand still. Even as more and more national newspapers are moving into the blogging game, The Guardian takes another leap forward with the launch of Comment is Free, a blog which publishes those most contentious of newspaper stories, opinion pieces, and allows the public to comment on them directly. While there is a comment moderation policy in place, according to co-builder of the site Ben Hammersley, this seems to be a brave move by the publishers, raising the chances of something libellous being published in the comments.
Perhaps the most prominent liberal newspaper in the anglophone world, opening a weblog for comment and opinion, with free and open user commenting is, to put it mildly, asking for trouble. Even more so as we come under UK libel law, rather than US. This means that libellous comments left on the site might potentially cost the newspaper a considerable amount of money. No one has ever offered this sort of content to the wider world in this sort of legal, political, or cultural context. This means that we have to employ a whole combination of technological and social countermeasures to make sure that the handful of trolls do not, as they say, ruin it for the rest of us. Frankly, it gives me the fear.
That said, the response doesn't seen overwhelming just yet. Most posts are only picking up comments in the single figures in the first day, although that number does seem to grow over time.
It'll be interesting to see how the experiment pans out.
Blogging may only be a few years old as a medium, but it's growing up at an alarming rate. The news that one of the pioneers of blogging (and podcasting, and RSS feeds...) Dave Winer will give up writing his blog Scripting News has created a hubbub of discussion all over the blogosphere. That's what you'd expect when a big name blogger decides to quit.
What is interesting though, is the discussion that started about whether a blog can survive the departure of its founder. Does it become, in short, a brand separate from the person who created it? As one blogger commented:
Scripting News it really isn’t your blog anymore. It’s ours. You just write it.
Scott of Publishing 2.0 posted at length on the issue:
Blogs are PUBLICATIONS whose brand identity exists separately from the “publisher” (i.e. the blogger).
Under this theory, the blog phenomenon represents an explosion in micro-publishing, but blogs still live and die by many of the same rules as Old Media publications. Which is why the “gatekeeper” debate has eaten up so much bandwidth — just because you publish, doesn’t mean you will be read.
The counter-theory to blogs as media institutions is that blogs are “cults of personality,” i.e. Scripting News is Dave Winer, and thus has no value without him.
I think the reality is somewhere in the middle. Most blog brands are developed through strong personality and distinctive voice, but once established, they take on a life of their own.
He also cites the example of Wonkette, a political blog which has survived the departure of the original wonkette.
It's an interesting and relevant debate as we, alongside many other "old media" companies enter the blogging market. Many, many magazines have had editors who have been as synonymous with the titles by the industry they write about - until they retire or leave. Why should "big name" blogs be any different?