Not all that hot

With all the buzz about blogging as the new hot thing, it's interesting to see that when you really start asking people if they care about blogs - or even know what blogging is - they confuse it with things like "dogging", which appears to be watching people have sex in cars. I had no idea that activity had a word. Nor that "happy slapping" means assulting innocent bystanders while your friends catch the incident on video and then post the video online.

Sadly, I can't link to the article they cite as the link seems to be broken, but it's quoted by royby and Rob Irwin. Another article which looks pretty identical is posted here.

What really amused me was this quote:

A shaken DDB London planning director, Sarah Carter, admitted: "Our research not only shows that there is no buzz about blogging and podcasting outside of our media industry bubble, but also that people have no understanding of what the words mean. It's a real wake-up call."

Oh wow. Do media people talk mainly to each other and live in their own little constructed world of topics which have been able to get over the news treshold. Who'd have thought. Oh, wait a minute, Galtung and Ruge pointed out in 1965 - that's 40 years ago for us who can still do simple calculations - that foreign news do not depend on the actual events in the world and their importance at an objective scale, but on what reporters think is important according to a certain set of criteria. More recent research only confirms that this is true all the way down to the local newspaper.

When it comes to weblogs, it is certainly true. How many of the weblogs in the world compete with, or even care about, the newsmedia? Still those are the weblogs journalists write about, and that is the way news media define blogs. A small, newsmedia-related part of the universe is taken to represent the whole.

media industry bubble?