Media folks are understandably concerned about bloggers. I've seen a bunch of panels on C-SPAN where folks from the NYT, the LA Times, and the Washington Post wring their hands over the professionalism of blogging. At the same time they aren't real happy about getting scooped .

I have news for the media folks: get used to it. Your profession isn't really unique. It's much the same with any knowledge profession these days. It doesn't take much capital to publish stories, so you should expect "amateur" folks to be doing it, obviously. And they're going to do it better, faster, cheaper. When technology advances and minimal capital is required to get into any given business, expect to be overtaken quickly, or at least to have much more competition than you used to. You'll need to do a better job than the rest of them, as distasteful as that may be.

The media folks most confounded by blogging would be wise to brush up on the history of open source software, I suspect. My capital expense to develop and release software is absolutely tiny: a $1000 laptop and a $100/month internet connection. Frankly, I do it mostly as a marketing exercise: the fact that I've solved some sort of problem reasonably well in the past is a good indicator that I might be able to solve another, and folks might be willing to pay me to do it. Releasing software lets folks have a look at how I solve problems. It's also fun.

On the other hand, some of the software we write and contribute to is in direct competition with software sold by highly-capitalized companies like Microsoft and Oracle. These companies have completely different reasons for developing and releasing software. Their business models are "grow or die" (if their stock stops going up, they "fail"), so they've poured great gobs of money into marketing. It's not as if the quality of their software is any better than the software we produce, it's just more important lots of people pay money for it, so it needs to be marketed more heavily.

Companies like Microsoft and Oracle still don't really "get" open source software, much like the NYT and Washington Post don't yet get bloggers. It just blows the minds of execs at these companies that you might release software for reasons other than to push up the value of a stock ticker somewhere; it's just utterly inconceivable to them. We shouldn't expect that to change soon, but eventually it will, and a new old-guard will pop up from within the ranks of the new guard (e.g. Huffington Post, Red Hat, etc) and eventually other folks will rail against those folks for some yet-to-be-discovered goals misalignment. And so it goes, on and on.