Tech Blogs - The New Elites

WSJ has an article on the rise of the tech blogs - the article notes that in the standard theory about technology blogs - mainstream media were out of touch, elitist or simply ossified, and they would soon be supplanted by a grass-roots army of bloggers. The reality is that while there are now as many tech blogs as stars in the sky, only a tiny fraction of them matter. These are becoming the the tech world's new elite. Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. Big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it's not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles. So much so, Nokia has a blogger relationship blog site. The easiest way to follow this world is via a useful blog-tracking service called tech.memorandum. It sifts through hundreds of technology-oriented blogs to find the hour's hot topics and who is saying what about them. The results are presented concisely in a single place, updated every few minutes. Another site, Blogniscient.com offers a similar service. The article makes a point here - It is apparently important in the tech blog world to pick a name that is as awkwardly unspellable as possible. The difference between the old media elite and the new blogging elite is that the latter gets redefined much more frequently. All it takes is attracting links from other bloggers.

Someone told me recently that the techworld is getting increasingly influenced by a few bloggers as against/along with the army of analysts tracking and reporting about companies. Besides the big list of CEO Blogs,blogs of ex-analysts like Chris Selland, Vinnie are all getting popular - not to forget the blogs like this & this are increasingly finding good acceptance. From my own experience, I can definitely state that certain topics like bring in huge traffic - all in a matter of few hours, all over the world, irrespective of the day and the time. The weblogs of old media stalwarts like O'Reilly, Zdnet, Businessweek, blogs from informationweek, infoworld - all these show that the blogosphere is becoming an increasingly important factor in the new media and shall increasingly get more & more significant in the days to come.