How democratic is the web?

David Hornik has an excellent article on VentureBlog:

Excerpt: But what about blogging? Is it evidence of democracy at work? My strong opinion is that blogging is indeed an excellent example of the democratization of information. Bloggers are turning journalism on its head in some respects. Look at the controversy surrounding my blogging of the Wall Street Journal Conference, when all the professional journalists were under a gag order. Suddenly the only source of information about what Gates and Jobs said at the conference is coming from bloggers, and the professional journalists are forced to cite bloggers as the source for their stories, rather than the speeches they themselves heard. Many bloggers are also able to report on highly specialized fields, so while they may not appeal as broadly as a New York Times, they have the potential of providing much more granular information. And that information has the capacity to have a greater effect on those targeted individuals who read it than the New York Times will have on the general public reading it. VentureBlog isn't intended to speak to the general Internet-surfing public -- it is intended to be read by entrepreneurs and VCs and students of the investment process, most of whom will hopefully find VentureBlog a better source for the sorts of information they find interesting than wading through the technology sections of the Times and the Journal.

Posted by Navneet at July 2, 2003 12:02 AM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam