Vaspers the Grate: Wall Street Journal Still In the Dark About Blogs: “Measuring Blog Impact” If you can get on the Wall Street Journal site to read about blogging, then you must jump to this retort to the article. We seem to be witnessing over and over people getting into blogging, loving it, then projecting their personal thrill onto the public-at-large. It’s weird. The fact remains that about 30-percent of the public, at most, are regular blog readers. There are probably a lot more who have stumbled onto blogs and read them thinking they are just websites.
I really enjoy Carl Bialik’s Numbers Guy column. So many statistics and figures are quoted in the press without any serious checking into their origins. Bialik bends over backwards to be fair-minded about his analysis, and at the end of each column includes a bunch of e-mails critical of his last column. If he thought his analysis of the Turkish Armenian genocide numbers generated a lot of passion, wait until the bloggers sink their teeth into him.
I stopped reading Vaspers’ critique after the first couple paragraphs. He doesn’t even let Bialik get out of the starting block, labelling as “bizarre and reckless” some well deserved humor over the incredible hype surrounding blogs.
I think it’s bizarre to see CNN dedicate a news segment to acouple of 20-something girls reading from web sites on worldwide television. Thank God for Jon Stewert and the Daily Show who point out and mock these trends before we have time to despair at the collapse of the fourth estate.
The Numbers Guy, Carl Bialik, is not trying to be a media critic. He merely looks at what statistics indicate, and even how they are contradictory to each other. I didn’t consider the article blog-bashing. This is an interesting paragraph:
“In a telephone survey of U.S. Internet users last fall, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 27% of respondents said they read blogs. (Users were asked: “Please tell me if you ever do any of the following when you go online. … Do you ever read someone else’s web log or blog?”) But in the same survey, Pew asked: “In general, would you say you have a good idea of what the term Internet ‘blog’ means, or are you not really sure what the term means?” Just 38% of Internet users answered “yes.” Of the 27% who said they read blogs, about 40% answered “no” to the blog-awareness question.”
Probably a lot of users who want to use the latest “in” lingo confuse reading ordinary articles online and reading blogs. On another note, I don’t particularly care for The WSJ’s commentary; however, they are now my only newspaper. I cancelled my subscription to the L.A. Times because it is filled with a ton of bullshit I don’t care about and don’t consider news.(but their opinions were interesting to read) So now I just read the news in the WSJ and 100% of my op-eds online.
No wonder I love Jacques Derrida so much.
Americans can’t read anything closely.
This WSJ article is pseudo-journalism at its worst. Evan Williams posted a link to my critique, and I’ve received lots of emails and comments supporting my harshing.
The “Numbers Guy” is lousy with words. He starts off making wild, unsupported claims about mysterious non-existing “surveys”.
He is merely bashing blogs AS ADVERTISING MEDIA. He is not thrilled with blogs, he’s laughing at them, but we’re laughing at him.
Idiot.