Blaglash.com

Blog: Noun.

1. A new medium invented sometime around the turn of the 21st century that allows anyone to post stories and content to the internet.
2. A way to kill the dinosaur journalists of mainstream media.

I’ve got no qualms with the first definition. However, the true power of blogs lies in the second. This newfangled way of spreading content all over the damn place and having as much power, referral, and readership as MSM is where blogs become truly revolutionary.

But do they really give power back to the people? The people reading the content and offering their take?

Two sides of evidence in recent bitch memes:

• Heads: Dave Winer and Michael Arrington wreak havoc upon a huge corporation without any mainstream assistance, and more or less “win.”
• Tails: The number of services, launching daily, which help track certain things like “the top 100 tech bloggers.”

What we do know: Blogging has given a godlike amount of power to certain bloggers. These bloggers have the power and readership necessary to tackle everything from tiny startups to the largest of multinational corporations.

What we also know: The number of people with this power is at most 100. And more likely, somewhere around 5.

Honestly, I’m grateful from the bottom of my loins for those roughly five people. I’ll take my news from guys like Dave Winer over Anderson Cooper any day of the week. I trust guys like Dave Winer to be straight talkers and always-relevant.

Hell, they say most people my age get their daily news from The Daily Show. I get almost 100% of my political news from the tech blogosphere. These guys have power, for sure.

But wasn’t blogging supposed to be about giving power to the everyman?

These top bloggers might very well be the ones breaking the stories (they certainly are in most cases), but they truly amount to a trivially small amount of actual content being contributed globally.

Even a guy like Robert Scoble, following his 20,000 closest friends on Twitter - it’s easy to get sick of his incessant tweeting, but he’s only in that position because there’s a whole hell of a lot of conversations going on.

Conversations that are not being had or followed by the so-called “top tech bloggers.”

So where’s the level? These guys took on big journalists and we listened. And now they’ve become big journalists with different motives on a different medium.

But we, the unread and unnoticed early adapters, are the people carrying the conversations. Providing the leverage.

Remind you of anything? Perhaps the climate of the media before blogging?

So where do we go from here, then? Do we attempt to level the ground with the force of numbers? How ridiculous and flawed is that plan?

Do we create applications that somehow redistribute good, relevant content not based on linkage and reputation? Seems ridiculous too.

So how do we, the early adapters with a whisper of a voice, plan to be heard?

Hopefully the plan we come up with doesn’t involve weekend bitch memes and link fests…