I was interviewed by Danny Bradbury about Blogging for a Canadian radio show today. Hopefully a copy of it should be up on the show’s site when it goes live, so I’ll listen in if I can. It was interesting being asked about my own blogging experinces, though, as usually I just get to recommend other peoples’ blogs or talk about the phenomena in general.

One of the questions was why did you start, which is always easy enough to answer - I started it because I wanted to write something that would expand my repertoire out of just plain reviewing and reporting into more free-flowing descriptive, less structured pieces. It also seemed a good way to keep the site content changing on a regular basis.

As for ‘is blogging a threat to journlism’ - something a lot of bloggers have been saying for a while, I’m absolutely certain it is not.

That’s an assertion most often made by bloggers who don’t have any connection to journalism in their everyday lives. If they did, I’m sure they would realise how eroneous it is. Sure, the word journal derives from the French ‘jour’ - day, hence daily updates and all that, but beyond that it has little to do with the printed or broadcasted media in any country.

Some blogs are excellent works of investigation. Many concentrate on a specialised subject like cancer, fishing or photography, which could technically qualify them as being regular specialised (online) publications. Others concentrate on towns and cities, including London and Tokyo. That could get them counted as commentaries on the life of (and life in) a big city and so be like regional papers.

Still others philosophise, which I guess is what I’m doing right now. It annoys the hell out of me when other people do it, so this entry is probably annoying the hell out of someone else right now.

Journalism is not about the narrow view, though - it is about the coming together of many minds and varied thoughts. Even a right-wing newspaper is written by a team, each member of which has a slightly different take on what it means to be right-wing, and a left-wing economics journal represents multifarious views of how to most equitably distribute the wealth of a nation, even if its contributors all share a similar ideological background.

So until the hundreds of thousands of blogs online right now are distilled into just thousands, or perhaps just hundreds, each written by many voices, blogging will never be a threat to the established pillars of journalism in this country or any other.

Ironically, though, perhaps it is the search engines that will ultimately do what the blogs alone could never achieve. By providing an easy way to search this quickly growing mountain of digital opinion, and comparing the results side by side, they are producing a set of ad-hoc blogs under the Google or Altavista or Dogpile banner, each of which is produced by a team of unconnected writers, who neither know one another or realise that they are contributing to anything more than their own site.

Blogs, then, in and of themselves, are not a threat to traditional journalism. Search tools like Google and Yahoo, perhaps, are.

I didn’t intend to write all that. I was going to write about the very lengthy briefing I went to this morning at the Guardian archive. Great building, great coffee, but very cold room and a very long talk. Interesting - all the new Apple stuff - but something I wrote about for the next issue of PCW, so it can be read in print in a few weeks’ time.

After all, I wouldn’t want this blog to become a threat to traditional IT journalism.

1. A PR view of bloggers
   Niall Cook at PR firm Hill & Knowlton, has written a piece for its corporate online mag, Ampersand, about using blogs as PR outlets. It's...
   
   
2. Learning about myself
   I had one of those meetings today that you come away from feeling very pensive. Plenty of things to think about, almost all about myself....
   
   
3. Blogsnob
   Hmmm... I've signed up to Blogsnob. They put little text-based ads for other blogs on my front page, and in return then place little ads...