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August 19, 2004
T & A & Ryan Shaw.
Ryan cracks me up. A couple of days ago he found the gestalt between my date with bad television and kottke's(?) link that seven out of the current top twenty most popular photos on Yahoo! News are of female Olympian asses. (The cracking up part came with the post title - "unmediated ass." Confused the hell out of me while I was reblogging.) Ryan went on to explain how a media by the masses will still result in the same old asses:
Kenyatta believes that the democratization of media will result in better content. I myself am less optimistic. Case in point: the “Most Popular Photos” page on Yahoo! News. Yahoo! keeps records of how often its news photos are emailed to others, and collects the most popular photos of the day there. This is photojournalism as selected and edited by your peers, freed from the shackles of Big Media. And this is how they’ve chosen to cover (or uncover) the Olympic Games.Ryan, I totally agree. We aren't going to change the power law curve just because we went all civilian on their asses (word count:4).
I experienced this back when I was program director for a community radio station. Each year we'd get a flock of new djs wanting to get on the air but all they wanted to play was commercial pop songs. Fast forward five years later and I'm working programming for public access. Half of all of the new shows are about music videos and video games. But that's okay. People like what other people like. As long as we're social, that's how it's going to be.
We've already been spimed. It just isn't totally explicit yet.
When Geocities started offering free webpages, it was the Sarah Michelle Gellar webring that exploded -- not Rainbow Ruthie. Once everyone starts videoblogging from their WiMax VoIP Treo 900s, they'll still be sharing their favorite Buffy moments and dismissing their Amy Goodman ones.
None of us are going to Robin Hood the joint. But we will have an opportunity to widen the paradigm a bit. 20% of the bloggers will still command 80% of the attention, but we'll make it easier for folks on the edges to find each other and hopefully build their own little villages in the shadow of Nick Denton's castle.
Okay, on that sound bite, I'm out.
Posted by yatta at August 19, 2004 5:33 AM
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