Sunday, January 20, 2008

Can blogs have legitimacy?

Old topic actually, but after the recent barkha dutt (yeah i too read the compulsive confessor blog) debate, I was rethinking about the role of information dissemination. With the advent of blogs et all you would have figured that the traditional news forms would have begun to lose credibility. In fact its easily the reverse, during the normal course of browsing through the web you come across so much information, you tend to look at the magazines/newspapers/periodicals to make sense of the information. The speed at which blogs can spread information truly cannot be debated (both when under restriction or about about products china,ipod/paris hilton as examples), but what you can and should debate if it really makes sense to read a lot of blogs or read the comments of a few select group of informed individuals (time is of the essence) along the lines of gigaom (yeah i am a real big fan of om malik, get well soon om) or the blogs of columnists and presenters.

What I generally look for from a blog ( i am not the most well read here, but relying on regular readers of blogs as well), is something personal. An insight which might not not be the worlds best informed piece of writing/or the most insightful but simply something that open up new vistas of thinking for me. If there are mainstream blogs (lot of people rely on them for information), the net automatically imposes a penalty on them for misrepresenting information (yeah, even valleywag needs to clarify its posts sometimes), the lack of correction would make the blog irrelevant.

Blogs are essentially anarchist forms of dissemination of information. You would more likely need an reader driven form of checking the veracity of content and I believe that that process is natural for groups of regular readers.