Turkey Day Blogs Matter Battle Ensues

Posted on November 24, 2005

Dan Farber, the Editor-in-Chief of ZDNet had some positive things to say about the blogosphere in a post entitled, "Why Blogging Matters."

For a journalist, technologist, politician or anyone with a pulse and who doesn't know everything, blogs matter. Every morning I can wake up to lots of IQ ruminating, fulminating, arguing, evangelizing and even disapassionately reporting on the latest happenings in the areas that interest me, people from every corner of the globe. That's certainly preferable to the old world and worth putting up with what comes along with putting the means of production in the hands of anyone with a connection to the Net.

It is hard to come with up an argument against "blogs matter" because blogs do matter. You can simply look at the people who find blogging therapeutic, the senior legacy bloggers who are recording their memories and the bloggers in China speaking out against censorship and know that blogging matters. And even then you are only examining a small portion of the blogosphere. But Jeremy Geelan, the group publisher of SYS-CON Media, disagreed with Farber in a post called "Are We Blogging Each Other To Death?" He argues that blogs lack insight.

Insight capture merits the full weight of all our attention and expertise in the publishing industry, because it is only through trapping "the best of the rest" that we shall ever achieve the promise of the bumper sticker: 'None of us is smarter than all of us.' Unfortunately insight doesn't reside in blogs any more than wisdom resides in Fortune cookies. Insight is more chaordic: it occurs wherever opportunity meets preparation, at conferences, in airplanes, on trains, in private e-mail exchanges. Above all, it takes place in context. If there were a way of capturing such epiphanies, if one could but scale them up so that humanity could benefit from epiphany-en-masse, then that would be quite another pair of shoes. But waiting for the Epiphany Machine to come around makes waiting for Godot look reasonable by comparison; and anyone who thinks blogging is the light at the end of the tunnel of collective consciousness has failed to spot that it's much more likely to be the headlight of an oncoming train called The Techno-fad Express.

Au.sys-con.com reports that Farber then responded to Geelan's post in Geelan's feedback column.

"Unfortunately insight doesn't reside in blogs any more than wisdom resides in Fortune cookies."
What does that mean?....that's just idiotic. You don't think blogs are chaordic?
You are right in one sense -- blogging is just a medium, available to anyone with a connection, and you seem to be using it (is is a column or a blog?) and getting enjoyment out of spreading your own verbiage, demonstrating your cleverness, connecting blogs, chaordic, epiphanies, scuba diving, Web 3.0 and Beckett -- and adding to the pile...

Unfortunately, any additional give and take in this debate is probably going to be delayed by the Thanksgiving holiday.