In the latest Infoworld, Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra comments on the blurring between blogs and conventional media.
"Mainstream media gets it now, and they realize that they can create a lot more content with participation from the community. Today, a lot of mainstream media articles are written on a blogging platform as opposed to a [traditional] content management system, and it's an interesting challenge."
A challenge in two respects: How to cultivate community content and how to ensure it achieves a certain standard of quality. Newsrooms everywhere are wrestling with this dilemma.
On the one hand there is the reality of an expanded public sphere of content that can help shape a conventional organization's content. On the other hand there is the reality of little discipline and verification of content, and that will ultimately pose a serious threat when a legal framework emerges around digital content in such areas as defamation.
Andrew Keen's book last year, The Cult of the Amateur covered this ground, but while it's true that conventional media are getting it, they're also uncertain about what they're getting. This is not an easy blur to accommodate.
