Tim Bray on blogging (yes, blogging) – it’s not dead yet. The long-form nature is obviously more appropriate than 140-char bursts for important things:
We increase and improve our body of knowledge through conversation. When this involves serious issues, those that matter, the appropriate unit is, more or less, the essay; neither very-long nor very-short form.
and that blogging has an important role in countering the BS that filters through more traditional everything-to-everyone press outlets. He refers to the “Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect“, where we see faults in press coverage of topics we’re familiar, but trust it in areas we’re not expert in. When, more likely, the quality of analysis is probably equally crappy and misleading across the board.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Michael Crichton (2002)1
So, best to have direct access to experts in various fields. You know. Blogging. And RSS. Viva la blogosphere!
- I think. the provenance of that quote is kind of sketchy. may be a bit of truthiness, or it may be genuine. Following the attribution chain takes me to this post on Seekerblog.com that refers to a speech transcript on Crichton’s website. But the page on Crichton’s site is gone. So… I guess we just assume that the page was there, and that Crichton’s family cleaned up the site since 2008… [↩]