Blogs: Time to Get Serious

As reported by TechCrunch, blogs are officially media. In two determinations handed down on September 4, 2007, the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that political blogs and bloggers are media for the purposes of US Electoral Law.

The blogosphere is shaking its head and giggling, since blogs have been one of the most reliable sources of information for a few years already. Everyone knows that if you want to find good information, use blogs and social networking sites. People rely on other people's opinions and referrals much more eagerly than search engines. It is now commonly known that search engines favor large sites with thousands of pages whereas sites of this size often belong to official "mainstream" organizations and commercial entities - and who can afford to trust these organizations nowadays when oil costs $80 per barrel and most of it has to be imported? I know I can't. Needless to say, there is no such thing as independent media, and I am not interested in infomercials.

If I want to know what's really going on in the US and the world for that matter, I read French, British and Russian news sources. I then browse blogs and specialized forums and contrast and compare information from these news sources with what people are saying.

So thank God for blogs and their innocence, however transitory it may be. It will not be too long before this medium is completely compromised with SEO-optimized content that has been sponsored from A to Z. There is a lot of it happening already, but for the moment, one can still find plenty of interesting, truly independent, blogs offering fantastic content.

Logically then, I feel saddened by the now official status of blogs as media. To me it indicates that from now own mainstream commercial entities will begin taking blogs seriously, hence "spinning" the blogosphere and eventually destroying blogging the way we know it now.