The Next Internet is Taking Over
This piece by John Naughton in the Guardian has some interesting and cogent points about the way the Internet works and why Big media still doesn't seem to get it and, like Big Music and Big Movies and Big Software, can only seem to whine and moan when it doesn't work the way they want it to. Samples

Assiduous students of the print media will have noticed its practitioners becoming increasingly exercised about 'Blogging' - the practice of publishing

On 18 May, for example, one Geoffrey Nunberg fulminated in the New York Times about the fact that whenever one does a Google search on any topical issue, the top page rankings often go to Blogs rather than established media sources (such as the New York Times ).

This was, according to Nunberg, A Bad Thing. After all, most Bloggers are not professional journalists, but rank amateurs! He was not the first hack to articulate this whinge. In fact, he seems to have picked up the idea from an earlier piece in the Register, an online publication. But the mindset he represents is widespread in Big Media, so it is worth devoting a few moments to unpacking the prejudices behind it.

Because I care about the Guardian getting their traffic, check it yourself, but there are a couple of other paras I want to put up front.

I would sooner pay attention to particular Blogs than to anything published in Big Media - including the venerable New York Times. This is not necessarily because journalists are idiots; it's just that serious subjects are complicated and hacks have neither the training nor the time to reach a sophisticated understanding of them - which is why much journalistic coverage is inevitably superficial and often misleading, and why so many Blogs are thoughtful and accurate by comparison.
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there is the problem - not often touched upon in the New York Times, by the way - that many controversial public issues are ignored by Big Media for the simple reason that the ideological and commercial interests of their proprietors preclude it.

This is why the US mainstream media has wound up misleading its audience about Iraq and the 'war' on terrorism.
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Then there is economics. One reason Blogs show up so prominently in Google searches is because Weblogs are available on the web while Big Media sources increasingly are not. Instead they are locked behind pay-for firewalls. (As with Nunberg's little rant, which I have just tried to re-read - and been invited to pay $2.95 for the privilege.)

Since the whole point of the web is full and comprehensive linking, and Google ranks pages by the numbers of other pages that link to them, it is hardly surprising that Blogs are winning over established media. Nobody in his right mind would link to a mere abstract.

The last of these is the most important. The structure of the Internet is an information economy, links are the currency and knowledge is the capital and Google is the Standard and Poors, rating the participants by the Internet criteria.

Because Blogs are, almost by definition, intimately and fiercely linked both to each other and to their sources, they will attract and capture the attention. It will of course, lead to pressure on Google to exclude Blogs and that would be fatal because Blogs represent the next phase of what the net is going to do. Watch this space.

BTW, Naughton has published a book called A Brief History of the Future: the origins of the Internet and demonstrates his grasp of it by linking to all the reviews of the book he can find, and commenting on the reviews in the process. Yes, this is what it is about.