Blogging has been with us since the early noughties and the Blog which this text is based on became the pioneer for a somewhat easy to use, and deployable to your needs journal and sharing of knowledge, following that dozens of companies such as Typepad etc etc came and some went.The subject of this particular blog thought, has got me more as someone who reads quite a few and appreciates some well thought out and considered content from them, some blogs may only be run by infrequent posters like me, others are updated every hour some minute by minute via tweets etc. But the content and the source of content has now become a major issue amongst some of the higher echelons of the Blogosphere (i.e ones with high readership), with some starting to become merely bottom feeders of press releases and other PR sources, thus making the transparency of a blog start to become less clear and in some cases murky, and most certainly less original!
Case in point, the millions of readers of the famous Techcrunch whose news stories interested and in their comment sphere making me sometimes laugh and pause for thought, written by some in the know, others who want to know, and others who well...
Anyway, to get to that crescendo of subject matter; is this, the recent spat with Kayak and AA is now well discussed and lawsuits and astonishment's flying (so to speak) back and forth; but the thing for me is the source of this information: when the news broke on July 23rd, according the Erick Schonfeld writer of that article AA Ditches Kayak stating that a CEO of a competing travel site had spilt the beans but did not and has not disclosed who that person was, some readers in the comments mentioned Mobissimo others Travelzoo; but for the company Kayak it didn't have a chance to engage with the source and had to publicly make a rushed statement on the actions by AA.
Of course, sometimes business is business, the competing Travel site may or not had much to gain from letting wind, but who had to gain was Techcrunch on the initial exclusivity of the article for reasons not explained..
Its now turns out that it was Kayak itself who terminated the relationship with AA, and the source of info to TC could have come from AA itself or via a PR company on their behalf.
In either case the Blog is now growing up, but with that for some whose avid readers who trust the content and its writers, and for the companies whose need to be seen could make or break them, it is now time also for accountability and good governance, those big buzz words which are often and have been used around the corporate and government worlds.
These online times are changing however for blogs. Travolution made the brave step of not spending the time editing press releases and uploading them raw with a visible statement of what they are, they intend to focus on journalism and the traditions and often values which they should represent, bloggers are not often writers and just have a passion for what they are interested in, the majority of blogs are like mine sometimes read by a few and postings infrequent but as long as we can strive to discover the truth in our interests and subjects, long may they continue.
Naturally. that change I mentioned is now coming in the form of aggregators such a Friendfeed who many a blog are simply changing their designs to match the stream and connectivity of like minded individuals but gives them more exposure, the other hand is that comments/conversation which for some are the life blood of many a blog and in some cases better than some of the articles themselves are shifting away from the blog and from the location of the article itself, which may or not be bad thing, unless your blog relies on ad revenue..
So, evolution like anything is on the cards, but whatever the blog will look like in the future, the trust in the information being provided and how that can be well considered thought proving analysis etc can only bring about a new age of collective intelligence for which it is starting to emerge and in some cases becoming well established, albeit sometimes with a few teething problems..
