10.27.05
Witness The Blog Rush
As everyone knows by now, Harriet Miers has withdrawn herself as a nominee to the Supreme Court. But that’s not what this message is about.
I have to work for a living. I don’t dig ditches, but it is stressful its own way. I have deadlines, I have reports to make. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do. It so happens that I work on a computer all day. So I’ll naturally jump over to Drudge Report or some other news site for a couple minutes when I get a fresh cup of coffee.
This is how I keep up with news in the world. I can read a headline and a paragraph of the top story of some web site for thirty seconds, a couple times an hour.
I’ve recently added reading news via RSS to my news consumption. I use the Google Reader rss aggregator. I like that it’s web-based and that the stories are sorted chronologically and not by source. I’ve got maybe a couple dozens feeds that give me far too much information to read, most of which I don’t read because I just don’t have time.
The habit that I seem to be developing is that I’ll check the reader in the morning when I get up, at work during lunch, and sometime in the evening. This is semi-regular, because I will go days without even looking at it. This is inconvenient at the moment because the Reader is still in early beta and doesn’t have a mark-all-as-read button yet.
Around 10:30 today, I must have been between tasks, and I took a few moments to look at the Reader. I saw the above story about the Miers withdrawal. BBC feeds just have the headline, one sentence, and the link to the story. I didn’t even click through. In that same couple minutes, my reader picked up a post by Ed Cone with just three words: CNN: Miers withdraws.
“Wow.” I thought to myself, “Mr. Cone must have been at his computer, reading the news, and felt the need to quickly post a link to the news to get the word out.”
It didn’t really make sense to me. Would an EdCone.com reader otherwise miss out on the news? Is he trying to be like Drudge? That’s almost all Drudge does — he posts links to news from other sources, and he’s pretty timely about it. That’s why I go there so often.
Is Ed Cone trying to be Drudge-ish? No biggie if he is. I just didn’t think that’s what Ed Cone did.
But, I didn’t dwell. Back to the grind.
At lunch, I was going through the reader again, and came across this Miers blog post from dent. Just a two line post, with links to two different stories about the withdrawal: one from the Washington Post and one from Reuters.
This made me pause.
I’m new to this whole blogoshere thing, so I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know how it work, but there is definitely some absurdity going on here. I took the time just now to search on Google BlogSearch, sort by date, and look at some more blog posts on the same subject at about the same time. There were line single-line posts on the same subject, this post is just one example.
It was a Blog Rush — the rush by bloggers to post links to a breaking news story early in the news cycle. Do these blog rushers have other jobs? How are they able to post links to their blogs to close to the release of the actual story from the traditional news media? How many professional bloggers are there?
I don’t find much value in this as a reader or a blogger. It just clogs up my RSS aggregator. I can read breaking news just as well as the next person on the Internet, blogger or not. It’s not like the withdrawal of Harriett Miers is some obscure news story that is somehow going to get missed. A better way for bloggers to post is like Dan Gillmor’s post on the Harriet Miers withdrawal. A paragraph excerpt from a linked story, and a few paragraphs of commentary or analysis. Very nice, and not much of a time difference between the other posts in the blog rush.
If we had more posts like Dan Gillmor’s and *a lot* less like Ed Cone’s and dent’s on the subject, the blogosphere would be better off.
Tony said,
October 27, 2005 at 10:35 pm
You make a great point. Gilmore gives a perspective many of common folk like myself may not have ever thought about.