Why the 'blogger' and the journalist should be friends

Tension between bloggers, those who maintain weblogs, and journalists can be lessened if they are seen as complementary rather than competing news sources

You're already working a full day. So why not take on a daily(-ish) task that:

1) you won't get paid for;

2) will require figuring out a software program you don't understand;

3) will take up, at the very least, a small slice of your day and may turn into an obsessive preoccupation (or perhaps I should just say, an obsessive occupation that runs alongside whatever occupation actually brings home the bacon);

4) maybe no one will ever notice or care about.

Welcome to the world of weblogs, or online journals, or, for the digitally hip who prefer their techie terms to have minimal syllables, blogs. I know, it sounds like a cross between bog and blather and blag, and for some blogs, a gooey, sludgy chancer's kind of verbal pointlessness sums them up pretty well.

Those are the blogs that are the equivalent of the really, really stupid personal Web pages some people stuck (and still stick) on the Web.

Lots of personal detail about nothing much of interest.

It's easy to criticise weblogs as a geeky form of vanity publishing, just as it's easy to criticise some people's Web pages for being a particularly banal form of self-indulgence. Fair enough, it's a big World Wide Web world, and it's not hard to find examples of endeavours that fit both these categories. Way too easy, as a matter of fact.

But the real heart of the Web is and always has been the fantastically diverse range of websites.

Forget for now the corporate stuff - businesses were the latecomers to the text-only internet and the image-filled Web, well after a dedicated, broad-ranging and heterogeneous mob were using it for communication and research and fun and some general silliness (still the best features of the Net).

Businesses may well begin to embrace blogs as part of their business - some, like publishers O'Reilly (www.oreillynet.com/weblogs/), already do - but it certainly isn't on their radar yet.

At the moment, blogs are about lots of people who spend hours and hours every week keeping a rolling journal online. These aren't just confessional sites - though some are. More interesting, I think, are the weblogs that have become some of the best specialist news sources on the Web. Bloggers often break stories before print journals do. Often they are the source of print stories.

Bloggers also offer plenty of commentary on stories that run in print, written by mainstream publications, and perhaps even more commentary on each other's writing.

There have been some well-publicised verbal battles between traditional print journalists, who earn their crust writing, and bloggers who feel they don't get enough respect for their alternative to the mainstream press. This has primarily been a clash between American proponents of each side, however.

When I participated recently on a panel in London on blogs, there were journalists and bloggers and journalist-bloggers (or is it blogger/journalists?) in the audience and on the panel. Most of the crowd didn't really see a big tension or dichotomy between what the various sides did. They were complementary, really, we (mostly) agreed although I think all the journalists and journo / bloggers also accepted that blogs pose, if not exactly a threat, then a huge challenge to traditional journalism because they are so immediate and often so informed.

Journalists, by the very nature of the work they do, write for a broad audience - even on specialist publications one is still targeting a fairly diverse group of people. Therefore journalists have to be generalists. They are trying to summarise perspectives, and give multiple views of a story.

When the subject is complicated, as most technology issues tend to be, a journalist has to spend much of his or her limited column inches explaining terms and background as briefly as possible. Journalists are on tight deadlines, and, under pressure, they can get facts wrong or simply may not have time to multiple-check facts and figures. Or they can be lazy and not check information adequately.

Bloggers are often specialists and deeply knowledgeable about their areas of interest. They can delve more deeply into the detail; they have the endless room of a webpage in which to do this. They can link to other sites of relevance. In many cases they top up a reader's half-filled glass by supplying what a reader didn't get from a mainstream journalist's story.

Some bloggers hate the limitations they see in mainstream journalism. Some journalists hate the detail-mongering and criticism of bloggers. Quite frankly, all this divisiveness makes me yawn. All these different forms of writing contribute to an overall picture. The bickering ignores the fact that different kinds of writing suit different purposes. I love reading blogs and I love reading newspapers and magazines. The delivery mechanism (and of course in many cases the legal environment in which each operates) just varies. Vive la différence.

Anyway. You can find just about any kind of blog out there that you might want to read - they are a full-fledged Net phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands of them online.

Some of my favourite tech blogs were around long before people called them blogs - like The Irish Times contributor Danny O'Brien's weekly e-mailed blog, Need To Know (www.ntk. net), or newspaper the San Jose Mercury's Good Morning Silicon Valley (www.gmsv.com).

After some three years of good but unrealised intentions to start a blog as a complement to other writing that I do, I finally sat down in recent weeks with the blogging software program, Radio, that I'd bought and downloaded from the Radio site (http://radio.userland.com/).

I'd wanted to experiment with a blog as a way of offering readers links to stories of interest, of commenting on events as they are happening, and of including lots of bits and pieces that don't or won't fit into a weekly print column or regular story.

So my column this week is an invitation to go online and check out my weblog, called Technoculture. I hope it might be something readers will enjoy dipping into and out of, as it is updated regularly. You can also post comments to all items carried on the blog - so it gives readers a forum in which to interact with each other.

The site is basic now but will evolve to include links to other blogs and sites of interest. You can find Technoculture at: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103966/.