Off to the Blogging4Business conference today, hope to see you there. I have an interview lined up with Guillaume Champeau, project manager of AgoraVox, on citizen journalism.
He believes that in five years, the publishing world will have changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.
He says: “This phenomenon puts together a real revolution that will dramatically alter the operation of traditional media and our future access to information.”
Other media speakers are James Ledbetter, senior editor of Time Magazine and Peter Bale, online editorial director of Times Online.
With newspaper sales on the decline, it should be very interesting.
Hi Ellee,
Thanks for commenting on my blog.
It takes time to build up a circle of blogging friends but they will come, meeting some of them in the flesh was quite a thrill and not something I expected. At least your non cyber friends are reading your blog, when I told my friends and family that I was blogging they showed no interest what so ever, I don’t think most of them even look at it.
I think your man Guillaume Champeau is kidding himself if he believes that informed people will look to amateurs for information as a matter of course. They won’t, the potential lack of peer review, the difficulties in measuring objectivity of the writer all mean that the information is probably not entirely trustworthy.
If I want to know about the tasmainian dust devil I will trust the London Zoo site over any of the blogs I read because as far as I’m aware none of the authors knows much more about the dust devil than I do. If they were to blog about the creature, they would have probably looked at the London Zoo website themselves so why not go to the source.
Having said that there are bloggers across the world and with many interests but still we are rarely the reporters of news. We provide comment, personal view points or gossip all of which are very subjective. We probably have as much relevance to the world out there as Polly Filler and Dave Spart in Private Eye apart from a few sites to which the term amateur is probably not appropriate.
Blogging for me is about personal expression and having a cyber social network who I can talk and listen to.