Ingram On Point in 'Yeah, blogs are so last year, dude…'

Blogger Matthew Ingram, who is "technology writer at The Globe and Mail" of Toronto, today posted an on point commentary on what he calls "chatter in the blogosphere about whether blogs are dead, whether blogs can ever achieve anything, whether blogs will mean the death of civilization as we know it, whether my blog can beat up your blog, and so on - all of which was sparked by this article in Slate magazine."

In addition to the Slate article, he comments on Trevor Butterworth's February 17, 2006 article in FT.com headlined "Time for the last post," which I write about here. Ingram mentions it in his post, for which I'm appreciative.,

I like Matt's perspective on "Choire Sicha (ex of Gawker and now at the New York Observer)," who was quoted in the Butterworth article as saying:

The word blogosphere has no meaning. There is no sphere; these people aren't connected; they don't have anything to do with each other.As for blogs taking over big media in the next five years? Fine, sure. But where are the beginnings of that? Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds. And they're all excited about the global reach of blogs? Right, tell it to China.

Here's how Matt responded to the quote:

It’s fine to say - as the article does - that blogs aren’t a revolution, won’t kill the “dinosaurs” of old media, and other lame truisms. But Sicha’s point is a different one: that blogs are bad because they fragment things, that they aren’t connected the way they pretend to be, and that old media needs to be there to “see the totality of things.” As tied to the early success of Gawker as he might have been, this shows that Sicha never really got it to begin with. Do there need to be aggregators or filters or sources that coalesce some of the fragmentation that democracy brings? Yes. Does that have to be “old media?” No. Sicha and others are short-changing themselves and others with their narrow-minded views.

I think he did a better job of responding to it than I did, and I agree with his conclusion. For more of his analysis, please see "Yeah, blogs are so last year, dude…"