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.
How do you tell an elite community from a regular community?
An elite community has ads.
re: tomslee “An elite community has ads…”
Nice one..
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
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.