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Cosmic implosion
November 09, 2008
A postscript to my Who killed the blogosphere? post:
starting Monday, Cosmic Variance will be bidding adieu to its life as a plucky independent blog, and huddle into the warm embrace of Discover Magazine ... Now, we know what you’re thinking: you knew us back when we were indie rock, keeping it real, and now we’re going all corporate? Yes, yes we are. If for no other reason than the thankless task of keeping the blog from crashing and handling the technical end of things will be put in someone else’s capable hands, not our clueless ones. But there are other reasons. Hopefully the association with Discover will open up new opportunities, and bring new readers to our discussions. And we’re happy to be joining an elite community of blogs that are already up and running at Discover.
"Elite community": now there's a telling phrase.
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Comments
How do you tell an elite community from a regular community?
An elite community has ads.
Posted by: tomslee ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.roughtype.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at November 9, 2008 07:02 AM
re: tomslee "An elite community has ads..."
Nice one..
Posted by: alaskareport at November 9, 2008 09:53 AM
Such an elite community is exactly the problem Al Gore mentioned in his Web 2.0 summit speech. Gore pointed out that television has taken away some of the freedom and access to the truth that the printing press first brought about. By putting the distribution of information by the televised media in the hands of a few, television viewers only have access to partial versions of the truth.
The emergence of blogs once solved the problem. But now with the fade of the blogosphere, again the general public start to lose their chances of voicing out. Though I agree to Nick that this process is probably inevitable and natural, it is sad and we'd better figuring out a replacement or an upgrade to restore the spirit of blogging.
Al Gore has suggest a "Unified Smart Grid". Though his intuition focuses on fields such as renewable energy and global warming, I believe such a grid, once it is created, might be helpful to establish a more democratic environment to protect the voice of little ones could be heard due to the quality of its content in contrast to the fame of the speaker.
Yihong
Posted by: Yihong Ding at November 9, 2008 12:11 PM
The "Unified Smart Grid" Al Gore is speaking of is a electric power grid. I don't know if anyway its theoretical basis could be used for another kind of grid, including the grid of ideas I think Yihong is imagining.
If it could, what will be the nearest nowadays application for that sort of creation? I'm sure that it would probably be more something like Facebook than the Blogosphere.
Posted by: Fabrizio Bianchi at November 10, 2008 02:42 AM
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Nick's next book:
Nick's latest book:
"Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company
"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews
"Riveting stuff" -New York Post
Greatest hits
Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians
The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar
Flight of the wingless coffin fly
Other writing
The end of corporate computing
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