Lee Gomes for WSJ: In the standard theory about technology blogs — which was the conventional wisdom until a few months ago — mainstream media were out of touch, elitist or simply ossified, and they would soon be supplanted by a grass-roots army of bloggers working intently at their laptops to speak truth to power.
The reality is that while there are now as many tech blogs as stars in the sky, only a tiny fraction of them matter. And those that do aren’t part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world’s new elite. Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it’s not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.
Consider a blog like TechCrunch, which chronicles the new breed of Internet start-ups known as Web 2.0 companies. The blogger behind it, Michael Arrington, is sufficiently influential that entrepreneurs in search of a write-up will make pilgrimages to his house to give product demos.
The fond hope of these entrepreneurs is that among his 12,000 readers will be a venture capitalist or (better yet) someone with a checkbook at Google or Yahoo.
[via Micropersuasion]
