Reading the latest big media blog blurb (from CNN), the Spartaneity Project loses patience with old-media tunnelvision, quoting the most egregious part of the squib, “When the dot-coms bombed, something shifted in Blogland. Well-known journalists and other self-proclaimed experts began blogging. They used their blogspace to comment on the news of the day with blunt and unvarnished insight. Blogs became something people wanted to read.”:
No, they became something that the mass market culture suddenly noticed. Believe it or not, CNN, actual real people were actually out there reading actual weblogs before you and other facets of the mass commercial media discovered them and/or started producing them.
In the never-ending writing and re-writing the mythos of weblog history, let’s all try to remember that weblogs were not somehow illegitimate prior to their “discovery” by the mass media.