Meeting of Two Mindsets

The Media/Blogger Summit yesterday was a meeting of two mindsets. So I guess it’s not surprising that some folks there described blogs as transformative, while others pooh-pooh’d them.

Chris Ahearn of Reuters, for example, used his talk in the very early part of the day to essentially liken bloggers to a cheap date! He called them "overrated," though in the same breath said they were great for the news industry because they were such an inexpensive way to open news organization’s discussion with audience.

By contrast ...

Sandy Pentland of MIT Media Lab said he sees blogs as a kind of "early warning system" that helped transform and hyperspeed the cycle that pulls public discourse into the news pages, then into action on the political front.

But what really jumped out at me about the potential role for blogging was an almost throwaway line by Robin Johnson of Financial Times, who was explaining that the way his fairly specialized business newspaper keeps its circulation up is to put news in context. That sounds a lot like what some bloggers do, no?

Johnson, later echoed by Dean Anthony Hopwood of Oxford University’s Business School, went on to say that the real opportunity in media lies with those who act as bridge between the makers of content and the users. Johnson was talking about this largely in the commercial sense, that is with intermediaries between buyer and seller in the shopping space. But to me this is what the mainstream media has traditionally been doing in the news space – and now bloggers are often doing for them. That is, acting as "infomediaries" between societal institutions and the general population.

To the extent that bloggers – and citizen media – can help fill even more of the gaps left by coverage of the mainstream media (such as with hyperlocal news), this seems like an awfully good place to be.

By the way, looking a bit further down the road, a number of folks on hand reminded the audience that it was really cell phones – not the higher profile iPod or video iPod – that would be the most exciting delivery mechanism of the future. That’s in large part because so many are out there (some 800 million) and that they’re typically replaced every year-and-a-half with units that are even more technologically capable. Not to mention how intensely personal cell phones are, as a primary link to one’s social network.

Now, can you imagine the possibilities for podcasters, bloggers and citizen journalists to deliver that news "with context" to users via cell?!