TechCrunch's Michael Arrington
says that changes in the business and practice of blogging make it an auspicious time to form a "dream team" of technology bloggers, a recipe that could produce a "a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business." He also inveighs against bloggers who seek to raise venture capital, arguing that money flowing into this delicate ecosystem "is disrupting the complicated and emotional, but also stable way things are done."
What's this--a champion of innovation, scourge of old media, disruptor par excellence--kvetching about threats to the status quo and calling for preserving the "stable" way things are done? Seems to me Mike is feeding on his own cake. That's because building a CNET crusher and preserving the blogophere in aspic are incompatible objectives. We can't simultaneously stop the clock and press go on the future. Blogging will change, whether under the influence of VCs or the arguably purer (and capital-efficient!) vision of their blogtrepreneurs (Besides, the idea that there's something inherently corrosive about running a business supported by venture money is a canard.)
The dream team idea is interesting, and it's fun to think of Arrington dishing the rock to Om Malik, who, gingerly side-stepping some poor ink-stained hack, alley oops it to Henry Blodget for a browser-rattling dunk (hmmm, wonder if I ingratiated myself with the right A-listers). But I do question the impact on the quality of blogging of effectively institutionalizing bloggers (not in the rubber room sense...although that's an idea) by entombing them within a larger organization. The best bloggers have a voice; media companies, by contrast, have a house style. Yet while bloggers are currently socking it to media firms, it just may be that you need an actual organization, with its greater resources and formal ways of doing things, to take down an established media player, even a troubled one like CNET.
In any case, media is changing blogging just as surely as blogging is changing media. There's no going back. Standing still may be even less of an option
- Alain SherterSee March 19 post from TechCrunchFor more see
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Has Arrington any clue what it takes to manage a team of rock stars? First thing you've gotta do is kill off the egos. Then what do you have? Ergo, it's Mike stirring the pot but in full knowledge it ain't never going to happen.