Sunday 13 June 2010

With hidden noise



Something that has consistently amused me about some bloggers is their disparaging comments about the professional media i.e. newspapers , television and radio. What I find amusing is that while calling "reporters" "repeaters" and labeling them the "lame stream media" they happily cut and paste from mainstream online articles for their blog posts.

While some amateur bloggers do publish the occasional piece of original research, in the main their blog posts are a cut and paste from a professional news site, then annotated with a couple of sentences of opinion. While the opinions are something you will never read in the mainstream media, they rely completely on research that is carried out and paid for by the professional organisation. I am sure that the readers are more than capable of coming up with their own opinions and don't need to be fed them by amateur bloggers.

Given the huge amount of content already published online and the large number of words being published every day it seems almost pointless to write & publish anything original online oneself. The best one can do is to selectively comb the web for content that can be collaged into something that goes beyond the original meanings of the source material.

There is no shame in creating a collage of ready made content, just don't pretend it is anything else.

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