Andrew Kantor's Place: Dvorak: Wrong Take, Wrong Reasons

Dvorak: Wrong Take, Wrong Reasons

Published 11/24/03

John Dvorak wrote an anti-blog column in the Nov. 19 PC Magazine. He wasn’t saying blogs were bad, just that personal, grass roots blogs were being forced into second-rate status by blogs produced by Big Media. In other words, blogs were quickly losing their power as independent voices.

Further, Dvorak said that blogs were largely being abandoned; people started them, then stopped. So the number of independent blogs is shrinking

Of course, the blogging community was Not Happy. Some folks attacked Dvorak himself (the usual he’s-thinks-he-knows-it-all stuff), others jumped to the conclusion that he was anti-blog (as opposed to his simply commenting on why blogs were losing their influence), and others tried to refute him — pointing out that according to Technorati (a site that acts as sort of a blogging clearinghouse) the blog rolls are increasing:

‘Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.’

I see a different problem with Dvorak’s piece. He assumes the strength of blogging is strictly in bloggers’ independence. Goliath loses power when lots of David’s are reporting the news. As the Davids — the bloggers — stop doing what their doing, Big Media’s gets to control yet another information outlet.

But blogs’ independent voices are only one of their strengths. The power of blogging is in the aggregate — it’s in having a lot of small voices that combine to form something larger.

As I wrote a bit ago, blogs link to other blogs link to still more blogs. This creates a web of connections between them. And it doesn’t matter if a blog only has a few of those connections. Dvorak writes abut a Perseus Development Corp. white paper on blogging, “[M]ost blogs have an audience of about 12 readers. Leaflets posted on the corkboard at Albertsons attract a larger readership than many blogs.”

Twelve readers is plenty. The power of blogs is in the spiderweb effect: something that touches one part of the web is felt throughout it. Imagine that something happens in one part of the ‘blogosphere’ and a blogger writes about it. His twelve readers see it and two of them blog about it. And two readers from each of their blogs also write about it.

And so on. Word spreads. Secrets are hard to keep. One voice is quickly multiplied by word of Net. That’s the power of blogs. It’s not about how many readers an indivudal has, it’s about the power of the blogosphere (gosh, I hate that word) to spread information with or without Big Media.