06 October 2004 Blog Home : October 2004 : Permalink
When I'm not blogging I work in the technology field. In the past I have articles and essays about various high tech topics, mainly on the Motley Fool message boards but also in a couple of other places (e.g. an earlier article on this very blog). All this is to give you some idea of where I'm coming from when I start my analysis of the recent mainstream breakthrough.
One of the things that irritated the (frequently correct) skeptics of the late 1990s tech boom was the lapses into jargon about gorillas, chimps, bowling pins that tended towards the picturesque and was easily misunderstood by the general public - especially the newbie investor. However the jargon had a point and, in certain strictly applied cases, it has predicted corporate and technology successes, if not investment success. The two pieces of jargon I'm going to refer to here are "disruptive innovation" and the "technology adoption life cycle" (TALC). The former refers to an innovation that completely changes the way a particular activity is performed or how a particular object is created. The later refers to the stages through which a new technology becomes mainstream. The best way to describe both of these is to look at an example.
The car is an excellent example of a disruptive technology. The first cars available in the late 1800s were cranky, unreliable. To the manufacturers of horse drawn carts, coaches etc. not to mention the entire "equine maintenance industry", they were more of a threat because they scared the horses than any sort of competition. But in fact the motorcar was not something that they could compete against once it got its worst faults ironed out. Because it was purely mechanical it required less support infrastructure once it became reliable enough and it could be manufactured more cheaply. Finally it produced less visible pollution and had the potential to travel much faster. A horse in say 1890 could gallop at 30mph or more and (at a slower speed) for a whole day while a car was unable to go more than a few yards without breaking down at speeds of more than 5-10mph. In 1923 the horse could still do 30mph while a car was able to run for 24 hours or more at an average speed of over 50mph (the inaugural Le Mans 24 hour race was won by a car with an average speed of 57mph (92 kmh) over 1372 miles (2209 km)) and these days it is unexpected when the average vacationing family drives their car at similar average speeds. The car was disruptive because it was impossible for the existing alternative to compete with it and it met a need that the horse could not.
Initially the first purchasers (what we jargoneers call innovators) bought them because they were different and potentially fast. True they had advantages compared to steam-driven vehicles (such as not needing about an hour to warm up before you could use them), but their advantages compared to horses were less clear. They did not need feeding and they took up somewhat less space and were easier to control but they broke down frequently and required expensive hard to find repairmen when they did. Thus the car promised its users saving from hay costs and the price of stabling but initially replaced those costs with the costs of repair. More to the point the infrastructure was in place to cope with horses - if a horse went lame you could rent/hire/swap/buy another one quite easily for example - whereas for the car even simple things like petrol were far harder to come by and breaking part of the engine was liable to lead to the new toy being ignominiously hauled to a not terribly nearby repair shop by a team of old fashioned horses.
Following on from the innovators were certain people could see distinct advantages in using cars despite their faults. These people - the "Early Adopters" - while still a small proportion of the overall population were sufficient to move the car from being a hobby to being something that could be used to make money. Once money could be made from the car it started to drive the improvements in reliability and infrastructure so that the worst defects of the car were fixed and thus produce something that was nearly as good as a horse but cost less.
At this point the car entered what is called the "Chasm" the place where many inventions flounder. Whether an innovation leaves the chasm depends on whether its benefits can be sold to the "Pragmatists" and enter "Main Street". Helicopters are a good example of something that has failed to cross the chasm. Their worst faults have been ironed out and so they fit in certain niches but there is no widespread adoption. For the car, and particularly the internal combustion engine, however once they became more reliable and the infrastructure to support them became more widespread, their adoption by the leading edge of pragmatists was swift. Then of course manufacturers such as Henry Ford and Michelin cut manufacturing costs and improved reliability so that within a few short years in the early 1900s cars took over from horses as the preferred mode of transport.
The Internet as a whole is clearly a disruptive innovation in many fields. Postal services have seen the decline of letter writing as email takes over, even for businesses, and all sorts of industries have been hit by the ecommerce capabilities of the Internet from stockbroking to books. However just because the Internet is a disruptive innovation does not mean that all Internet applications will necessarily conquer all their traditional counterparts. While the recording industry is certainly facing what I believe to be a disruptive innovation from the combination of MP3 and P2P filesharing, the book printing/publishing industry is apparently doing just fine using the Internet to cut through the distribution chain but not suffering from competition from electronic books. So are web logs the equivalent of Amazon or the equivalent of Napster for traditional journalism?
The evidence indicates that blogs are indeed a disruptive innovation. Compared to traditional journalism they have low startup costs and low distribution costs, but they combine that with low sales revenues and low perceived reliability/accountability. Furthermore, as a result of the low revenue, they are unable to perform all of the functions of traditional journalism - paying a consulting expert for a few hours of his time would move the average blog well into the red and few bloggers are able to afford to even travel to where the news is happening. Thus, as with the initial motor car to horse comparison the blog looks like a joke compared to the existing media. But, again as with the motor car, the blog can fix its disadvantages whereas traditional journalism cannot change the fact that its establishment and distribution entails large fixed costs that cannot be cost-reduced, just as the horse cannot be improved to run at 50-100mph day in day out, the cost of distributing a newspaper or television station cannot be reduced to that of a blog.
It should be clear that the blogosphere has moved beyond the innovator adoption phase. There are millions of blogs in the world and we know that just the aggregate top 10-20 blogs are together serving millions of readers per day. So what were the features that has made the early adopters keen to blog and read blogs? Clearly the first is the (lack of) cost. All it takes to read a blog is time and it takes very little more to write one. In order to surf the web you already have all the tools required to blog so the additional investment is effectively zero. Although blogs do not directly make money for most bloggers they do gain the capability to publish their own thoughts and opinions in a manner that would otherwise be unavailable.
The first crude mostly hand created blogs started around 2000 although some sites with blog-like features were available earlier. The first versions of the major blog publishing systems supporting features such as comments and RSS feeds showing up in 2001. This latter date marks the start of the early adopter phase. Since then development has been fast, the trackback system arrived in mid 2002, services such as Typekey comment registration, comment management and indeed the separate hosting of comments and trackbacks (e.g. Haloscan ) and scanning services such as technorati showed up in short order as limitations were discovered. Each of these helps to make the blog more useful and thus adopted by more people. Moreover as the features and reliability of blogs have increased their uses as a replacement to even more sorts of traditional journalism have increased.
Initially blogs challenged only the most fluffy or self-absorbed forms. A blog was essentially an online, not really interactive diary. As such it challenged gossip columnists and those tedious sorts of columnists who write entire columns about their daily life as an overpaid resident of Manhattan (you know the sort that whines continually that the Honduran nanny is impossible and how shoddy their favorite coffee shop has become recently). Next (or possibly simultaneously) blogs started to replace the columnists in technical journals and the combination of a number of blogs with comments, trackbacks and links began to challenge the publishing of special interest magazines. Not that all special interest magazines are threatened by any means but blogs allow far faster and easier discussion than having an infrequently printed newsletter or similar with a large letters page for a hobby or small interest group. There are numerous blogs (e.g. Sam Ruby's intertwingly) that are effectively commentary on some code or standard or other technical topic that is of little interest to the rest of the world. This is not a direct challenge to conventional journalism since no journalist or publisher would ever want to spend time and money printing a journal to compete, however they are an indirect threat because if a topic does become interesting to a larger audience the chances of a journal being setup are lowered because all the information is at the blog. If the blog is taking ads (using blogads or google) then there is even less chance of forming a competing outlet. As time goes on this seems likely to increase with more and more areas where a technical or trade magazine could be viable reduced.
The same limiting effect applies in other fields, for example while foreign correspondents write about the doings of the rich and powerful in far off lands, they rarely write about the details of everyday life. On the other hand bloggers in foreign countries frequently write about the foibles of their neighbors and the view of the man in the street for the posturing politicos. These sorts of background article may in fact be more interesting and important than the headline interview with the president, but they are something that requires the writer to be immersed in the local culture to write effectively. The general retrenchment of the news business means that the pool of foreign correspondents of the sort that lives for years in a country is steadily decreasing. Combine that with the increase in blogging expats and multilingual locals and you have another ares where the blogs are able to make a serious challenge to traditional journalism. At this point it could be that the traditional journalists are still ahead but the low cost of blogging threatens the cost structure of maintaining journalists abroad. The foreign correspondents are able to justify their salary etc. only through their access to the top levels of society. This is the sort of classic rush to quality approach in the face of a disruptive innovation that has killed numerous high technology businesses. Apple, IBM and Sun (as well as numerous failed companies such as DEC and Wang) have, in their different ways, moved up or tried to move up market as a way to respond to the threat of the commodity Wintel PC. The point is that the blogosphere is acting just like the PC nibbling at the niches that are only marginally profitable for big media and slowly but surely increasing the number of these niches.
I think the answer to this is a resounding YES. The fact that blogs were able to provide the pressure that led to Trent Lott's removal and to the debunking of the CBS forgeries is evidence of their reach. Another is the aforementioned advertising methods and the fact that certain blogs are as a result able to make money. Blogs have moved mainstream as it is more than the early adopters who are using them. Pragmatists who want to see different news and analysis read blogs in addition to their other sources of news. Over the last year or two the blogosphere has tornadoed with growth rates of 100% per annum or more and technorati now claims to be monitoring over 4 million weblogs. Not only that but weblog hit counters are indicating ever-increasing traffic growth. True the growth is uneven and the distribution of traffic between the top sites and the rest is exceedingly skewed but that is no different to the difference between the distribution levels of the Daily Telegraph in the UK and the Riviera Reporter here. The difference is that not even Fox News is growing its readership at the same rate as the top blogs let alone the blogosphere combined and in fact the majority of traditional journalism outlets are slowly losing their readership. This is not necessarily directly correlated with the growth in blog readership since it started long before blogs were common yet I suspect that blogs are aiding and abetting this trend.
Although blogs in the West and particularly in the English-speaking world are doing great things I suspect the next major achievement for blogs will occur in other parts of the world. Much of the coverage in the traditional media recently has been about the US pyjamaclad ankle biters, but the challenge to traditional journalism is far greater in those countries where censorship is a fact of life. For people who live under censorship, the traditional media is already completely discredited the only question is whether blogs as a whole can fill the niche of trusted news and analysis provider. Mobile phones proved themselves by the mobs that protested in Manila some years ago. Blogs may well be as instrumental in governmental overthrow or the debunking of fraudulent elections and the like somewhere in the world. My favorite nation is Iran which has an enormous number of blogs and a lot of extremely frustrated young people. Whether revolution will occur or not I cannot say but it looks to me that the Iranian regime is getting weak.
In the English speaking world I fully expect the fact checking and research capabilities of thousands of bloggers to provide a healthy reality check to traditional journalism. Whether bloggers can become the prime source for future talking heads I do not know but I do expect that many bloggers will become more and more influential amongst the decision-makers and the other chattering classes. I also expect blogs to evolve in a way that readers find it clear whether a particular blog or blog article is primarily a linking one synthesizing data from elsewhere, an analysis one or one that presents new facts itself. So far the latter has been rather thin on the ground although InDCjournal, Wizbang, The Shape of Days and Dean Esmay amongst many others have all interviewed sources and produced exclusives as a result. What these baby steps have shown is that nothing about blogs prevents them being investigative journalists other than a lack of salary from blogging. Although I suspect no blog will ever provide the sort of regular salaried income produced to the top traditional journalists, I can certainly see blogging provide a better and more certain income than that received by the numerous freelance journalists, agency stringers and the like who get paid only when their material is actually used.
I suspect that traditional journalism is going to go the way of the train in the face of competition from the car and aeroplane. This is better than the fate of the horse which has been relegated to being almost purely a leisure pursuit but does imply a significant decrease in influence and importance. As I noted in the early adopter section punditry is looking particularly vulnerable, in fact I suspect in the next year or two we will see all major pundits either embrace the blogosphere or disappear. The analysis of bloggers is not noticeably of lower quality and indeed bloggers such as Wretchard and the no longer blogging Steven DenBeste seem to provide consistently more accurate and apposite commentary on current affairs than that produced by the majority of oped pages. Likewise the decline of the computer/IT trade press into pure infomercial/advertorial looks assured. There is very little value that the current trade press provides to its subscribers and most of that value is obtainable from other sources. I no longer subscribe to any trade journals and I have not noted any loss from doing so. Undoubtedly some high quality trade journals such as the EE Times will persist but purely online sites such as the Register and the Inquirer, which are similar to blogs in style, are in fact better than the weekly journals in most respects since they are updated daily if not hourly with new stories.
I suspect that all journalists will in fact migrate to the blog world either directly or indirectly and their current employers will, over time, move to a model of republishing the best of the web. With traditional content providers such as AP and Reuters just looking like one source of content competing with many others. I have no doubt that respected brands such as The Times or The Washington Post will remain, but rather than be perceived as the provider of original content they are likely to be repositioned as a trusted source of web content. In other words the news process will begin to split itself in to components that can be aggregated in multiple different formats.
The following books describe disruptive innovation, the TALC and related terms
The Junkyard Blog links to a complementary article by a blogger called "Old Patriot" who seems to expect more cooperation and less competiton between blogs and the rest of the media. This is - I feel - a classic example of the working of the blogosphere. In near real time I am able to update this essay to refer to and argue with others. No traditional printed media can do this and very few take advantage of the online world to do so except by occasionally rewriting history by silently changing erroneous articles.
Let me make it clear - I expect the majority of journalists to become bloggers in one form or another. This is no more said out of malice than Henry Ford might have predicted the change of stables to gas stations. Because of the limitations of branding and reputation online the only way the blog world can build trust is to exhaustively document its sources and changes to its output. The coincidental result is that the blog world has an inbuilt transparency that current traditional journalism does not have. As the Junk Yard blog says:
If we didn't already have blogs, we'd have to invent them now. But our role as watchdogs over both the political and the powerful doesn't mean we're at war with anyone. It means we're checking up on them, seeing that they get their facts right and clear out their own unacknowledged biases. When we spot those biases and errors in facts, we do come down like a ton of bricks. It's the only way we could get the MSM's attention, and is a fully justified response.
The way I see it is that no journalist in the future can afford to not have a blog where he puts up his own corrections and ammendments and where he debates the alternate views of the readers of his columns. As soon as a journalist becomes a blogger (think Andrew Sullivan, Michelle Malkin, Johann Hari...) he (or she) is able to receive criticism of his or her articles and can then respond to that criticism in short order. Debates that might once have taken weeks in the letters page of a newspaper (assuming the newspaper was willing) can now be over in a day or two and the result is likely to be a second column for the journalist quoting his readers comments and making counterpoints which are stronger because they have already been tested in the blogosphere.