- what is a blogger?
- are bloggers journalists?
- are bloggers objective?
- is a blog an article or a column?
- are bloggers a threat to journalism?
- and from the PR folks, “if I want to send you a press release, how do I do it”?

John Ford put it best in his DFT Digest Blog, “it felt like a bunch of dogs getting to know each other … independent EDA bloggers just had their collective butts sniffed by journalists and PR/marketing folk”.

Bloggers are being evaluated by the journalists according to their pre-existing categories. But, the paradigm has shifted and the journalists still think the world is flat. They need to get themselves a compass.

So time, manpower and the size of the potential audience are huge factors in the determination of news.

Bloggers, on the other hand, have different filters. Actually, only one. “What do I care about today?” Bloggers are self-promotional and self interested. The fact that a lot of people read a certain blogger’s site is inconsequential to the decision to write about something. The numbers are only a gauge of whether the blogger can make money on advertising and a way to boost his ego.

Now is that true of every blogger? No, of course not. I would say that describes about 99.999 per cent of all bloggers, though.

Should journalist consider bloggers a threat? Yes and no. No, because the bloggers are probably not going to cover a story the way a journalist would, i.e. with objectivity, so the authority of the blogger would be questioned. But, yes in that blogs are competing with newspapers for advertising and sucking revenue away from newspapers, which will cause them to fail.

If the current model continues, all we will have is Google and blogs for our information… and Google will only have blogs and press releases to disseminate.