Fraidy Cat

Daniel Terdiman, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, disses blogs. A few choice lines:

Everyone seems to be writing a web log these days, and those without day jobs have a decided advantage.

And:

It seems that blogs are still new enough that scepticism about their authenticity has not yet set in.

And:

But even experienced readers let their guard down when they follow a trusted friend’s referral, he says. If a friend passed you the web address, “then you definitely think it’s true”, Rubel says, “because you’re talking about word of mouth”.

And:

Blogs are also often taken seriously these days because of their status as the platform for a new kind of journalism, and the way that many of them imitate the format of news sites.

But a well-designed look and feel do not prove that a site is what it claims to be, Rubel says. “If you think about it,” he says, “there are sites that are blogs that look like professional news outlets that you would never know that they’re written by amateurs.”

One reason that many people put faith in such blogs may be a desire to escape a mundane daily existence.

The only blog actually mentioned by Terdiman is Bill Clinton’s Daily Diary — an obvious hoax. No mention of InstaPundit (whose blog is so untrustworthy that was hired to write for MSNBC), of Andrew Sullivan (who has been in Big Media his entire professional life), or of the fact that many Big Media outlets now have their own in-house blogs.

If blogs are so bad, then why did Terdiman do nothing but take cheap shots at them?