I originally wrote this post at Credit Writedowns under a different title yesterday. I have changed the title to more accurately reflect what I am driving at in the post. Otherwise the post is exactly the same. The question is: which media companies will find their revenue streams threatened by the shift in the financial media landscape?
I made the case I espoused in "A few thoughts on the difference between blogs and news" for collaborative filtering as the major source of authority in the blogosphere. Just to recap what I'm talking about, I wrote:
My last thought is on how blogs gain authority/notoriety. When I began, I can tell you that no one knew me from Adam. I had zero authority, no readers, few connections. All I had was ideas, analysis and judgment…And the same is true with pretty much every other econoblogger out there. What I see is a collaborative filtering in which the blogging community weeds out the more spurious information and the better analyses flourish. This is the future of the Internet in my view, because collaborative filtering harnesses the talents of the entire web in a more decentralized and less-hierarchical way.
The immediate reaction from within the panel came from James Ledbetter of The Big Money site at Slate Magazine. He said mine was a "stylized" view of the econoblogger ecosystem, which I think means I was overstating my case. Not all spurious information gets filtered out. Fair enough.
I want to make a few observations about this exchange. First, it occurred to me in retrospect that, as opinionated as I am, I have a tendency to speak in direct, declarative statements. I can leave people with the impression that I am absolutely certain of everything I say. It's as if I don't consider alternative views, or, if I do, only to ridicule them. A perfect example of this is the post "The Germans will not bailout Greece" from February. After I had written it, I was horrified at the strident tone and added an addendum at the end to tone it down:
I see it as unlikely that any deal – bailout via the EU, IMF bailout or backdoor help via quasi-fiscal measures from the ECB – can be reached…
