Dan Gillmor has posted three more draft chapters from Making the News, his upcoming book on the way that the Internet and journalism are changing one another. This is a very good draft, but he wants to make it better, so he's soliciting your input on ways to improve it.
In April, 2001, Apple Computer's public-relations agency got a request from a blogger, Joe Clark, who wanted to interview someone inside the company about the Macintosh operating system. Clark had written for tech magazines, and his now-dormant NUblog (www.content.nu) was an increasingly popular site, but the PR agency didn't know this. Frustrated by the negative response, Clark posted the e-mail exchange on his site, which in turn prompted a cease-and-desist letter from the agency's regional vice president. The entire episode showed how fundamentally clueless Apple and its PR people were about a medium that was growing in importance.
To be fair, this was 2001, before weblogs were well-known. Clark was a relatively early player in what Azeem Azhar, a principal in 20six, a European weblog tool company, calls the "eBay-ization of media — everyone can be a buyer and a seller." Others call it "nanopublishing" — small sites, run by one or a very few people, focusing on a relatively narrow niche topic. Niche bloggers may lack the influence of a major publication. Some are what Azhar calls "a teenage boy who drives the mobile-phone purchase decisions of his group of teenage friends; or the London yoga practitioner who has 60 or 80 fellow yogi readers on his blog, and who influences their yoga-related purchasing."
Chapter 2 Link, Chapter 3 Link, Chapter 4 Link
