Planetopia on Weblogs
Yesterday Planetopia (the previous link is just for Google, check here for the show) ran a show about weblogs in Germany and the german blogosphere is running wild. To cut a long story short, I actually liked it. Sure, there were errors, but as Markus says, it doesn’t really matter what they say, just that they say it and spell the names correctly. Nico seems to be taking the reporting with a smile and whether he is being sarcastic or not, I am not sure.
The thing is while they were wrong on Schockwellenreiter, which is actually why lots of people are linking Planetopia to an entry by him about where they lied, they still covered a good deal of ground. Yes, blog posts are less researched than a New York Times article, but they should have emphasized a bit more that if you lie in the Blogosphere you get what you asked for. Planetopia will notice after the bomb hits :) And as Markus says, people will make up their own mind if the content they get from blogs will be good enough for them.
You can get the show right here if you want, but it’s in German.
They did raise a good point though. New York Times is researched and if they post something it is reasonable to think it is correct. In the Blogosphere this is not the case. Yes NYT can be wrong too, but the threshold to post something is lower for Bloggers, and should be. The people reading blogs need to be educated though that this is the case. We will need to move people from reading one NYT article to not one blog but 20. People will need to think again and make up their own mind.
What Planetopia didn’t cover enough, is the entire Jamba fever, where they had a very good quote from the PR guy at Jamba but little was said about their first reactions where they discounted the threat posed by blogs.
Still, all in all a good one I have to say. I have to mention Planetopia once more though ;)
<b>Update</b>: Almost successful with the Google Bomb: Planetopia Search .