Blogsphere and Open Source, Same Game, Same Outcome

Like the surface of the moon, the blogsphere doesn't have a very smooth surface when viewed up close. Eventually, the blogs, the updates, the comments narrow the distance between themselves and the facts. Like the sausage factory, it looks like messy business.

First there was someting called Laughing Squid who said: "My friend Arno mentioned that Microsoft’s spellcheck dictionary doesn’t contain the word “blog”, so I looked it up using Tiger’s Dictionary app and found out that blogs are actually “run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers”. Ah, that explains it."

I saw the story echoed several places during the day (CNet), finally noticing it in Dan Gilmores blog (frome which I got what appears to be the original reference).

My ire was raised against Apple. Well, raised to a higher level anyway. But then came the updates:

"UPDATE: As some of you have keenly noted, Apple employees did not write the dictionary themselves. They're in the business of defining "cool," granted, but stop short of applying that lexicographical skill to other words. The Tiger definitions are actually provided by Oxford American Dictionaries."

"UPDATE 1: It has been mentioned on our comments as well as those on CNET’s Apple Blog that the source of Apple’s dictionary definitions come from the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition. So if you are a non-American blogger who is not in your twenties and have a healthy interest in the internet, don’t flame Apple for their definition examples since they didn’t write them eventhough they do not cite the source of the definitions they use."

The comments on the blogs pointed out that the offending sentence was a usage example not a definition.

The Blogsphere got it wrong. Terribly wrong in fact. The original story was, really, a non-story. Hardly worthy of mention once you knew all the facts. But how often do you check your newspaper's errors section? Do you even know where it is located? How often does the CBS Evening News carry a correction or update?

The mainstream medias have a great advantage in that they often have field reporters (think "troops") on the ground to cover stories at the White House, Congress disaster scenes, and so, often, the blogsphere can be no better than its sources. Unless of curse the story is happening right outside a bloggers window, or at their place of work. A lot of good information these days is coming from anonymous, or near-anonymous bloggers.

The mainstream media can and does hire people to do fact checking on their stories, although recent evidence is that they don't have enough of them, or they don't do their jobs very thoroughly. But the blogsphere can correct, cross-check, double-check information far faster than any media organization. Think of the comparison between a single monolithic mainframe computer and a large networked cluster of less powerful machines. Given enough network bandwidth and enough nodes, the latter can match and exceed the former in almost all cases.

Survival of mainstream media is in the long term dependent on it finding those niche applications for which it is uniquely suited. The Internet and the Blogsphere is a long way from displacing the mainstream news services, just as it won't replace Hollywood in the near term, and just as Open Source solutions won't put Microsoft out of business any time soon, if ever. The Blogsphere and Open Source can, and may however, continue to render the alternatives less and less relevant, forcing those old institutions to work harder to justify themselves.

The trends are in place, and their direction is clear. That trend favors individual initiative (for now) over entrenched and corporate interests. Changing the Blogsphere, to improve it for example, will be like herding cats, so at best we can watch, and try to predict what the outcome will be. More importantly, the entrenched interests can watch, try to predict, AND act, to preserve themselves. Notice how many of the mainstream media sources, particularly and not surprisingly tech media at this point, are turning their writers loose to do their own blogging. Many of these tech journalists complain of the strain of having to blog and put out regular "official" columns as well. Maybe relief is on the way, as people pay less and less attention to the "official" versions, with their lack of feedback and updates, and rely more on the "unofficial" blog reports, with their greater immediacy and interaction.

The patterns governing the interaction between "News" and blogging parallels that between commercial software and Open Source. Same game, same rules, and probably the same outcome. So what will it be? How soon can we pronounce that a significant change has taken place. Maybe we are there already.