For blogs, as with P2P, infrastructure is politics
To follow up on Tom's post below, Cory Doctorow recently mentioned to me the Mitch Kapor line, "Infrastructure Is Politics." We were talking about peer to peer but I think this applies to blogs as well, and it perhaps will help Tom understand the intensity of the reaction to blogs. (But let me say at the outset that I could live without anymore articles about someone famous is now blogging, or noting that someone has stopped blogging as if this meant something.)
My point about P2P is that from the early days of Napster people conflated -- and continue to conflate -- the infrastructure that is P2P (e.g., systems that allow PCs to function as both clients and servers, typically simultaneously) with the common applications of the infrastructure (MP3 filesharing). But there are many applications for P2P networks, such as cycle sharing, grid computing, massively distributed processing, video redistribution, etc.
The conflation has reached the point where Hollywood and politicians are ready to sacrifice the many benefits of using this technical idea because of fear and loathing of the filesharers. Hmmm, actually it's more than conflation. This concept is not that difficult and these are not stupid people. Did anyone think that maybe this is about more than just MP3s and video thievery? Well, infrastructure is political, and when you look at the infrastructure you can see just how radical it is, how much control and centralization can be wrested from the media owners with a change in infrastructure.
Here's Larry Lessig on the topic, from an interview that should be running shortly on O'Reilly Network.
ReplayTV spent two years in litigation with content owners who claimed that they were producing a technology that people used to create copyright infringement, and that they should be held responsible for it. Two years of litigation is enough to sap out all the resources of a startup company, and they were eventually forced into bankruptcy. ... If you can pull somebody into court under some vague standard of liability just because the tools are being used by people to create copyright infringement, that's a very good way to block new innovation that might change the way copyright material gets distributed. So it's a strategic opportunity to exercise control over the future of content development and distribution and not so much as a way of protecting copyrights. (emphasis added)
Fast forward to blogs. One of the recurring themes from the New Communication conference was that blogs represent not only new ways of communicating but fundamentally different ways. A premium is placed on speed, individuality, incompleteness, snapshots in time. To put it another way, it's about having conversations not marketing. Or its about PR not advertising. All of these things sound vague and like a bunch of hot air, but I think there is something essentially true. And this is threatening.
What the Internet does is churn through established businesses. That's what technology tends to do (see typesetting) but the Internet spins the churn that much faster. The music business will not survive in its current form. Technology magazines are becoming a dying breed. Small city newspapers will die out (craigslist is estimated to have cost Bay Area newspaper $65 million in classified revenue). So blogs will continue the Internet effect.
Not entirely because the content is better or more relevant or more distributed, but because the infrastructure is fundamentally different, much like P2P can shift the entire distribution of media industries. Blogs and RSS are shifting the distribution of news, marketing information, company releases, commentary, etc. I'm talking about infrastructure here. When Scoble says that if you don't offer RSS you should be fired, well, perhaps he means that if you don't get that RSS is the infrastructure of the future, then you won't find a place in the new communications landscape.
Infrastructure is politics. It's also economics. And communications. It's an unsettled time, things are shifting, it's not exactly clear how or when but it's certain that the change when it becomes obvious to the people now shouting it's all a bunch of crap will be cataclysmic. It's not so much what bloggers are saying today that is important; it's how we're saying it.
