Saturday 11 February 2006

Holmes home on the blogs

Hey, the BBC says I'm part of Sherlock Holmes's 'Baker Street Irregulars' - and so too are most of you lot. Listen up. Says Paul Reynolds, World Affairs correspondent for the BBC:
I regard the blogosphere as a source of criticism that must be listened to and as a source of information that can be used. The mainstream media (MSM in the jargon) has to sit up and take notice and develop some policies to meet this challenge...
Reynolds gives a some examples of what he calls "the collective strength of blogs," and continues:
[Bloggers] have an army of what Sherlock Holmes called his "Baker Street Irregulars," that is an almost unlimited number of people around the world, many of them expert on the subject under discussion, scouring sources and sending information in to an easily accessible central site which can disseminate it instantly.

The other role of the blogs is to criticise and attack. And here they have shown their power in a way that ought to make big media organisations also take notice.
The MSM are slowly beginning to sit up and take notice. Read the whole piece here. [Hat tip Antarctic Lemur]

LINK: Bloggers: an army of irregulars - BBC

4 comments:

Oswald Bastable said...

What I see happening is that:

1- The blogs are beating the backwater (NZ) MSM to stories- often by days.

2- People hear a MSM story and look to the blogs for commentary on that same article.

3- A large proportion of people would rather read/parrot someone else's opinion than take the trouble to form their own. MSM doesn't like it when that opinion is not their one!

4- MSM's worker drones don't like the way bloggers are not fettered by an editor.

Jude the Obscure said...

This is what I do: I read the headlines of 3 papers online - British, Australian and the Jerusalem Post. NZ papers I have found are just a re-hash of what is in these three and a waste of my time. Then I go to two American blogs and three Kiwi blogs to see what they have picked up on. I read the comments of the news items which interest me in the blogs. Blog commenters often have links to other items of interest on that topic. All in all, due to blogs verifying or elaborating what is reported in the papers, I now consider myself politically well informed for the first time in my life. All in one hour a day.

sagenz said...

jude - you need to use bloglines. you can cover a far greater number of blogs. my behaviour is similar but having an interest in nz politics means the herald is a must.
that is a good article. some in the msm are finally recognising the expertise and resources of the blogosphere.

Julian Pistorius said...

Bloglines eh... Hmmm... I've been having trouble staying abreast of all that's newsworthy on the web. I used to use Sage (no relation to sagenz) for my RSS aggregation. It's a Firefox plugin. I thought it was pretty good, but I wanted something web-based. So this comment spurred me into trying it out.

Well, sagenz, you're right, it was pretty good. On one of the first blogs that I added to Bloglines, I noticed an item about Google Reader, Google's own online RSS aggregator, which has just been released. "Wow," I thought, "I've gotta check this out!" And so I did.

I quickly exported all my Sage RSS feeds and my newly-created Bloglines feeds, and imported them into Google Reader. Wow. Google Reader is amazing! I thought Bloglines was shiny, but Google Reader is in a different class altogether. It is very easy to use, and unlike Bloglines and Sage, has almost instantaneous response, thanks to Google's great AJAX interface. If you've used GMail, you'll know what I mean.

I can heartily recommend it.

Here's how to export RSS feeds from Bloglines:
http://www.bloglines.com/help/faq#export

Links:
Bloglines:
http://www.bloglines.com/

Sage:
http://sage.mozdev.org/

Google Reader:
http://www.google.com/reader/