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Revenge of the Blog: Keynote: Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds
Posted by Steven Wu on Friday, November 22 @ 12:35:17 EST Legal Technology
Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds opens the Revenge of the Blog conference.

Click "Read More..." for continuous updates on the speech.

Professor Jack Balkin begins with his hope that the conference will give us some answers about how blogs have transformed journalism: who are the journalists, what journalism consists in, and so on.

Ernest Miller then introduces Glenn Reynolds: law professor extraordinaire, Yale Law School grad, and band member. Reynolds's Instapundit is, as many visitors here will know, one of the most widely read blogs on the Internet.

See images from the speech here.

Glenn Reynolds Himself

Reynolds remembers starting the first law and technology student group at Yale Law School. Met at first with confusion or derision, law and technology has now progressed to become a huge field in the law, and a "big playground," an opportunity for people to do things they couldn't do before, engage in new social interactions, and have fun in new and different ways--as important as the economic impact of the Internet.

Reynolds discusses Professor Cass Sunstein's book. The original fear was that the Internet would be an echo chamber: people would only link to people they liked or agreed with, people would only read sites they liked or agreed with, and conversation would soon cease. To some extent this is true. But, Reynolds notes, blogs are different: though he has no hard data, he would wager that blogs link to more disagreeing sites than to agreeing sites. Blogs are more akin to conversations than to lectures--and the audience knows if you're making stuff up, and they can tell you right away.

Old media sites on the web try to keep you on their site. Blogs, on the other hand, link all the time--and that accounts for much of their popularity. There's been some movement of blogs into big media: such as Mickey Kaus's Klaus Files on Slate.com.

Is this just a fad? There's some reason to think that might be the case. There's a great deal of turnover in the blogosphere: some people have left, some people are on extended hiatus (like Ted Barlow). But there are still people around. And the upside is this: blogs are cheap. Compare Reynolds's readership with that of a small newspaper: that's impressive. What's not as impressive is Reynolds's revenue (almost nothing). But, to flip it around again, what's just as impressive are Reynolds's costs: $36/month for nearly unlimited bandwith! Cheapness is one of the defining characteristics of "thin media." And, in the blog world at least, cheap does not mean low quality.

(Of course, that's not to say you can't make money: Gizmodo links to Amazon.com and other sites while writing about gadgets, and makes quite a bit of money on referral fees.)

The fact that blogs are cheap means that you don't have to make money to use them. And what that means is that the blog world is open to amateurs. Reynolds parallels this to the early journalists, who reported cheaply to a small audience of interested readers. Reynolds doubts that blogs will ever replace big media, but he also thinks that blogs have a permanent role to play in mass media.

Reynolds disparages certain big media web logs, comparing them to Communist rock bands: they may look the same, and play the same, but there's just something missing.

Big media has moved away from real reporting in the last few decades: you can get news from big bureaus anyway. So instead, the media were supposed to focus on analysis and big features. But wait: this stuff is cheap, and thus is exactly the stuff that blogs can do. The one thing that big media used to be able to do, and blogs can't do, is gather hard news. So Reynolds thinks that blogs will slowly push big media back to their real advantage: the gathering of hard news.

Reynolds imagines a blog-run news service: a collection of bloggers, with perhaps some ranking system a la Slashdot. But then, he says, you'd basically have the New York Times.

Blogs are dynamic: conversations rather than lectures. You can just ask a question, or offer an observation, and then ask, "What do you think?" And you can then solicit opinions, and repost. This raises some questions about libel: given the dynamic nature of the blog, and the constant updates, Reynolds thinks that a correction on a blog should be given much more weight, particularly since readers recognize the contingent and dynamic nature of most blog postings; and also since most readers tend to be repeat readers, and most corrections tend to be equally prominent, so a correction will have more force.

The dynamism of blogs also keep them honest: because people can email any mistakes, and bloggers take these emails seriously, if a post has been up then you can be pretty sure of its authenticity (or, at least, the consensus of the people who read the blogs).

The political consequences of blogs are easy to exaggerate. The computer-related phenomenon that will have the biggest long-term impact politically is not blogging at all, but computer games, which have a huge, subtle, and unreported effect on politics. If you think about the assumptions built into a lot of games, like The Sims. Think about how many people play these games, and become completely obsessed by them. The assumptions in Civilization are perhaps correct--peace doesn't work, if you're really powerful people will band against you just to counterbalance power, weakness or appearance of weakness always draws hostile attacks--but these assumptions certainly have a political component, and they become ingrained in people's minds. But this has been ignored: coverage of games in the press has been superficial.

The reason why games get less attention: journalists and politicians don't play games. But they do read blogs. And that's why blogs have disproportionate credit and impact on the "real world." But that's also why blogs can get ideas out: especially quick reactions to political phenomena. Reynolds believes it helps minority groups in large organizations by organizing outside support. And it probably helps promote transparency in organizations, since bloggers tell people how things work in a constant stream, not in discrete chunks.

What about an expansion of the blogworld? Reynolds speculates about audio and video blogs, but acknowledges that it's a lot harder, and less portable, than text blogs.

Reynolds never expected to have the kind of traffic he gets on Instapundit: he had no marketing plan or business plan or investors. But it's been interesting. One of the reasons Reynolds began his blog was that he taught Internet law, and he thought it would be useful to be "part of the game." He was hoping to get a couple of hundred high-quality readers, but he wound up getting a lot more. And this helped him in a lot of ways. For one, his students found him more credible as an Internet law teacher. And it has affected Reynolds view on a number of subjects: It's made him feel differently about web privacy, since he now tracks referrer ids and visitors, and realizes that this kind of "invasion" of privacy can play an important and legitimate role in increasing interaction by following links from referrer logs. Blogging has also made Reynolds less tolerant of hackers, having been hacked when he used Blogger.

Most importantly, he's learned first-hand the real value of free speech. When you get a lot of traffic and email from people, you learn how smart people can be, and how many smart people are out there without Ivy League credentials, or jobs that you would associate with smart people. And that's an experience that, Reynolds feels, more academics should have: academics simply don't appreciate the general intelligence of the general public. Reynolds has also been impressed by just how open the world is through the Internet, and the opportunities it gives: Reynolds points to the Homeless Guy Blog, and the Baghdad Blog (which is still free in Iraq because, according to Reynolds, the authorities haven’t quite figured out blogging). There are also a lot of Iranian bloggers, and Iranian women bloggers, in a society not well known for openness.

 
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"User's Login" | Login/Create an Account | 4 comments
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Re: Keynote: Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds (Score: 1)
by JamesGrimmelmann on Friday, November 22 @ 12:52:32 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.laboratorium.net
It's significant, perhaps, that Reynolds is a professor, not a journalist. Professors are people who get paid to provide their (knowledgeable) opinions to niche markets. This is a lot closer to the ideal blog model than journalism is.

Modern big-media journalism is focused on business models in a way that the modern academy isn't. Hence the reason that journalists are always asking him about whether he could make money off his blog, and he keeps on saying, "no, that's not the point."


[ Reply to This ]

Re: Keynote: Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds (Score: 1)
by JamesGrimmelmann on Friday, November 22 @ 12:58:56 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.laboratorium.net
A blog-run news service is exactly what IndyMedia is trying to do. They're constantly trying to figure out how to build journalistic credibility without cutting into their open-posting philosophy, but perhaps the magical properties of Collaborative Filtering will save them.

A blog-based news service -- if such a thing can can work at all -- may not need not be centralized, hierarchical, or staid, as our learned speaker would seem to be suggesting.


[ Reply to This ]

Re: Keynote: Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Friday, November 22 @ 13:21:11 EST
A Blog about a cat:

The Glorious Life of One Anabelle-Bob

- The Comedian


[ Reply to This ]

Re: Keynote: Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Saturday, November 23 @ 10:09:35 EST
Blogs may have an even bigger impact than some believe, although I do also agree there will still be a need for a scaled down "Big Media" and for real shoeleather scraping, bullet ducking reporters.

That said...

Think of the blogosphere as a huge computer. Facts come in one end; multiple policy options/explanations come out the other. The "product" is a set of "peer reviewed" opinions, where the peer reviewers are bloggers and blog commenters with relevent knowledge. Information resides on computer hardware, but all real knowledge resides in people. The blog brings the two together in a nonlinear chaotic dynamic (in the scientific sense) mix.

As Glenn says, much of the actual reportage is done by freelancers for the big wire services these days. I would not be surprised if some persons start subscribing to the wire... beside those who have access to Lexus like Glenn that is. There is another angle however. As the blog density (blogs per square mile) grows, the likelihood any given useful fact will escape notice decreases. I'll use our own Samizdata.net as an example. In the last three months we've had three major hits with photojournalism stories we originated. One of our people simply saw things of interest in his Chelsea, London area; took a digital camera to them and voila: pickups in everything from Drudge to Wired to UPI. We originated the news. Another example, one I'm sure Glenn has also experienced, is getting a private email from a reader on something which is potentially a big hard news storiy. We just got one and have actually fed it to "Big Media" for fact checking at the international government level. Old style reportage is needed because we don't have the time (with no blog income and real lives) to track down ministers and do ambush journalism to confirm/deny.

I think in what I've written you should see some of the cooperative dynamic that is evolving. We're only at the beginning.

Dale Amon
Asst Editor, Samizdata.net


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