Blogosphere newsroom and google journalism (1)

These are, if I may be so bold as to say, the only two things that really caught my ear during this year's Webstock. While it was an amazing networking opportunity and a good chance to see all the people who make a difference online these days, I still think that because there's loads of doing, nobody stops to think about the "springs" behind some of the things that happen in online these days.

Vlad Petreanu mai have nailed the much discussed issue of bloggers and new media vs journalists and old media with his reference to "newsroom blogosphere". While he was trying to make a point about circulation vs traffic he actually stumbled upon a more interesting concept of how we really read blogs. Because, truth be told, nobody really reads one blog. We read several like we would read a newspaper - to get info about different fields. Our "online newspaper" is actually made of several blogs covering several themes, pretty much like a regular newspaper which devotes pages to different subjects. This concept while making a lot of sense also solves two things:
1. The idea to pay just one blogger to endorse your product works, if that blogger's following and stature equals that of a famed editorialist, someone who offline would represent the voice of a whole newspaper (and online, the voice of a whole group of bloggers)
2. To make a campaign stick, you need to enlist the help of several blog (i.e. pages in online readers' daily digest) - unless you think that offline you'd be able to get noticed by placing just one ad one one page, in one newspaper, for just one time.

Now, what this concept does not solve is the problem of endorsing vs advertising which was much discussed at the Blogging workshop and which I will save for later
[Saturday calling]