The blogosphere has made plenty of noise around the idea that it scoops main stream media. Personally, I don't believe this happens as often as some would have us believe, though it certainly does happen and often, as in the case of certain types of events like natural disasters, with clear impact and value.
I do believe, however, that there is steadily increasing delay in ideas getting picked up and amplified by the A-list. Of course, this is the type of claim that needs far more than the single point of anecdotal evidence that I'm going to point to, but the hypothesis suggests that, as the blogosphere matures, how it operates, and the role and influence of the A-listers is going to start mirroring much of main stream media.
On Feb 24th, Steve Rubel posted about What's Up? - a news/geolocation visualization. I had posted about this on Feb 14th after reading about it on the most excellent Infosthetics that same day. Looking back further, using BlogPulse's Conversation Tracker (o how I love thee), we can see that Peter Conolly posted about it on January 27th when it was being digged. It turns out that there are a number of different URLs pointing to the page, and so the earliest post I can find is actually from Jeroen Leijen, who posted on Jan 4th. Looking at the Alexa stats for the author's site:
shows us the digg day (Jan 27th) and possibly a couple of earlier days (late December and early January).
Searching on digg shows us that the site was put there by MilkAndCookies - I'm guessing related to the site which appears to have posted the link on Feb 8th after digging it.
Now, I'm not 100% sure that Rubel's post was the first A-lister to blog this (Technorati doesn't yet have Rubel's post as far as I can tell, and the highest ranking blogger for this link when using Technorati's rank by authority is Infosthetics). However, if we follow the story, it shows that Rubel picked this up a couple of months after it was launched, and about a month after it was digged. This is not really a criticism of the system, more an observation and a heads up about how to use A-listers in your reading habits. What I would criticise is that when something like this does surface, the commentary is not really interesting or insightful. Rubel gives a 'isn't this cool' post and fails to link to or compare with other similar services. The whole notion of citizen journalism surely implies something more than passing links around - don't these people have something to say?
Compare it with the celebrity A-list in real life, Matthew. Do they generally have something to say?
Posted by: Niall Cook | February 25, 2006 at 06:40 AM