Back in 2004 I was flying all over the place, promoting blogging. It was the year The Blogger entered the public eye, came out in magazines, built empires. One of the great debates was the clash between Main Stream Media (MSM) – the newspapers, publishing houses, and TV stations – versus the citizen journalist, the bedroom blogger, the unwashed masses of online writers.
MSM, of course, said that bloggers were not accurate, were not honest, were temporary, that only MSM was the font of Truth and quality information. Well, so much has happened since then. I feel there is still a place for professional journalism, but blogs have settled into their niches, providing a "long tail" (there I said it) of content of varying quality and scope. And, well, blogs today aren't the same as blogs 5 years ago, in the end, they are still just an online publication.
But watching the style and aspirations of the DIYbio crowd reminds me of those days. It seems that the friction between DIYbio types and Main Stream Scientists – the labs and institutes – hovers around the same issues as in the day of blogger vs. MSM.
And I think the change will be just as profound and the outcome just as mundane.
Image taken from Six Apart's post
