Have you ever noticed that regardless of what you order at a Mexican restaurant it?Äôs all made from the same ingredients – meat, cheese, beans, rice, lettuce, tomatoes and tortillas? What a marketing job the early Mexican restaurant owners went through. Faced with the realization that they didn?Äôt have much of a business if all they could come up with was one item on the menu whose ingredients were meat, cheese, beans, rice, lettuce, tomatoes and tortillas, they developed a full menu of dishes with names like burritos, tacos, enchiladas, chimichangas, and fajitas ?Äì all with the exact same ingredients ?Äì and successfully sold it to the American consumer. Their marketing was so good that in Mexican restaurants all over America you can actually hear people say things like, ?ÄúI prefer the fajitas over the burritos,?Äù which just isn?Äôt logical given that they are the exact same thing just with a different name.

Web technology is kind of like Mexican food ?Äì its all basically the same thing (http, html, with a side of scripting), but the technologists and consultants have come up with different names for various applications for purely self-aggrandizement purposes. Take blogging for example. Why not call a spade a spade and call it keeping an online journal. When businesses blog its called ?ÄúCorporate Blogging?Äù rather than ?Äútalking to clients?Äù. I guess corporate blogging sounds more important.

The point of this post is not to demean the value of blogging, but rather to keep things in perspective. I read a great article last week that is a great complimentary piece to this post. Enjoy!

A BLOGGER IS JUST A WRITER WITH A COOLER NAME

Why Blogging vs. Traditional Media Has Been Oversold

January 16, 2006

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By Simon Dumenco

I?Äôve been thinking of what I am — about what any media person in the digital age is — since having coffee last week with a 30-something newspaper editor who bemoaned the fact that newspapers keep on setting up blogs as these separate, exotic add-ons to their Web sites, instead of integrating blogging into their usual newsgathering operations. There?Äôs simply no good reason to segregate the functions, he insisted.

And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder.

It?Äôs just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

OK, you might argue, blogging is aesthetically a different beast — it?Äôs instantaneous media. (Well, since the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, pretty much all media has had to learn how to be instantaneous.) It?Äôs unpolished. (The best blogs I read are as sophisticated as anything old-school media publishes.) It?Äôs voice-y. (The best old-school media I read tends to be voice-y.) It?Äôs about opinion, not reporting. (The best reporting to come out of MacWorld in San Francisco last week was published on blogs.) It?Äôs, well, often sloppy and reckless (and Judy Miller wasn?Äôt?).

OK, then, you might further argue, the Internet itself treats blogs as structurally distinct things. Well, sure, there are blog-specific search engines (Technorati, Icerocket, blogsearch.google.com, etc.), but the lines between blog and non-blog content are rapidly dissolving. Traditional news organizations and blogs often get seemingly equal weight as news sources in Google News. And just last week, I found out about Sprint?Äôs West Coast fiber optic network outage from the new Gmail ?ÄúWeb Clip?Äù ticker that sits atop my e-mail inbox — and the clip came from a blog, not a traditional news organization.

So why does the idea of the blogger as The Other continue to persist? Because many bloggers, of course, like the idea of being all alterna; it?Äôs a point of pride, a tenet of the ?Äúblog community?Äù (whatever that is), that bloggers are superior to the musty, lumbering, out-of-touch traditional media. And for traditional-media types, blog/blogging/bloggers are variants of a sort of linguistic armor — labels that allow old-school-ists to convince themselves that they are the true professionals, and they needn?Äôt radically alter the way they work (i.e., work way faster, interact constantly with readers, be vastly more voracious, etc.) to compete with the amateurs, the arrivistes.

Of course, the false dichotomy gives rise to internal inconsistencies — like at The New York Times, which is acting like David Carr is one thing (he?Äôs a columnist!) when he?Äôs doing his Monday media business column and another thing (he?Äôs a blogger!) when he?Äôs doing his Oscar-season dispatches under The Carpetbagger rubric on NYTimes.com, even though both are edited by a Times editor before being published. (By the way, why isn?Äôt The Carpetbagger called The Carrpetbagger?) Those who remember David?Äôs spirited, nearly instantaneous media reporting at Inside.com know that he was ?Äúblogging?Äù way before there were blogs. (A historical note: I was a columnist for Inside; David and I never worked together directly, though we shared editors.)

A lot of the tendency to draw lines internally, I think, has to do with the fact that most old-school publishing organizations with online components invested heavily in the ?Äô90s in then-state-of-the-art, but now-cumbersome online publishing systems, which are functionally very different from more nimble blogging software solutions. But over the next few years those legacy systems will be phased out and everyone publishing online will be using some form of what?Äôs now commonly thought of as blogging software.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: In the very near future, there are only going to be two types of media people: those who can reliably work and publish (or broadcast) incredibly fast, and those … who can?Äôt.

The Media Guy?Äôs column appears weekly on AdAge.com and in the print edition of Advertising Age. E-mail him at dumenco@gmail.com

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