The blogosphere is not "credible"
Steven Straight leaves a comment on Heather's post warning that the blogosphere is losing credibility. (I left a comment on the post, but don't feel like waiting for it to be approved.) My point: The blogosphere by itself has no credibility.
Context & Ripple Effects
The credibility question has been building for months on both flanks: The RSS Blog mapped the spread of spam blogs back in October 2005 (State of the Splogosphere), while ABCNEWS' Silicon Insider argued that November that Forbes had fumbled its own attack on bloggers (Forbes Fumbles the Blogosphere) — mainstream press getting the medium wrong even as junk content polluted it.
Into that standoff, Steven Straight's warning on Heather's post that the blogosphere is 'losing credibility' draws the counterpoint published here: the blogosphere as a whole never had credibility to lose. That reframing echoes February's argument that features like comments define what a blog even is (Is a blog without comments still a blog?) — trust lives at the level of the individual source, not the platform.
First-order effects
- Readers weighing Steven Straight's warning against the author's rebuttal must judge specific blogs by track record, since neither side treats the collective label as a credential.
Second-order effects
- The splog problem documented in late 2005 makes per-source vetting unavoidable: as fake blogs multiplied, any blanket judgment of the format became useless to publishers and readers alike.
Third-order effects
- If credibility attaches to named authors and individual outlets rather than the medium, the industry's trust mechanisms shift toward reputation, verification, and editorial process — the same ground traditional media claims as its advantage.
The trend: Web publishing's credibility debate is moving from whether blogs collectively deserve trust toward which individual sources and verification practices do.