Kottke on Blogs versus the NY Times in Google

Kottke presages the results of a bet between Martin Niseholtz of the NY Times and Dave Winer: whether blogs or the NY Times would have higher authority (from the Google perspective) in 2007. And the answer, today?

[from Blogs versus the NY Times in Google (kottke.org)]

Here’s the overall results, excluding the Judith Miller search:

Overall winner (in spirit): Media (beating citizen media 6-2).

Overall winner (actual): Blogs (beating the NY Times 6-2).

Some observations:

My feeling is that Mr. Nisenholtz will likely lose his bet come 2007. Even though the nytimes.com fares very well in getting linked to by the blogosphere, it does very poorly in Google. This isn’t exactly surprising given that most NY Times articles disappear behind a paywall after a week and some of their content (TimesSelect) isn’t even publicly accessible at all.

There’s a lot of analysis that I have skipped, because I want to dig into the real issue: will blogs have higher authority than traditional media from the perspective of individuals? After all, Google is a proxy, a channel, to the opinions of the greater public.

We should determine how to measure the authority of blogs directly, through surveys or polls. My bet:

• A surprisingly large proportion — 75% or more — of those who are online regularly will, by 2007, state that the most authoritative sources of information for subjects of importance are blogs. Note the caveat — “subjects of importance” — which is not an attempt to mince words, but on the contrary to point out infovore dynamics. If I am deeply interested in social software, I will think that the most important authorities in that area are bloggers; however, if I am vaguely interested in modern art, I may not expend the energy to track down the most authoritative thinkers, and instead settle for the middle brow coverage in my local paper.


• Those who are not online regularly will not see the same seismic shift to blog authority; but by 2007, in the Western world, these numbers will have slipped another 10% or more. Old fogeys, like my 80-year-old dad, will still reject the Internet, and will view television and other push media as the most reliable source of news and information. The youth demographic, and the connectroids, will all swing the other way.


• Notable pockets of resistence:
  
  • Media professionals: no surprise, they will read their own junk, and state that — for a long list of reasons — it’s just better
  
  
  • Politicians: these guys live in a bubble, and have learned how to play the opaque game that is the hallmark of politico-journalism. Bloggers are less inclined to go along with concealing identities — “A highly placed source in the State Department…” — that is a sine-qua-non in the grey zone of political converage, as just one example of the new ethos to come.
  
  
  • Corporations, especially CEOs — another group that resides in the psychobubble of media adulation. On one hand, traditional media appears to be poking and prodding at the nutso deals that high-flying CEOs are getting from happy-to-oblige boards, but on the other, even left-leaning media has conformed itself to the power structure of modern industry, so the oligarchs will find it easier to consume traditional media.
  
  
  • Religious groups — some may take up the use of blogs, when they have not become closely allied with tradional media (like China), but wherever they are free to proselytize and are seen as a part of the mainstream, they will more closely affiliate with traditional media.

The blog phenomenon is a solidly middle-class, professional-class revolution. An intelligent and educated populace who have decided to regain control of media, rejecting the self-annointed priesthood of the church of journalism. Many or most of the pillars of pre-blog civilization will cling to traditional notions of media authority, and argue that bloggers are not, well, housebroken, accurate, or respecters of authority. Although, for the great majority of the online intelligensia, who aren’t concerned that we tend not to say “Sir” and “Ma’am” a lot, bloggers will have become the authorities.