The two most popular blogging softwares are called Word Press and Movable Type, both in honor of the cultural revolution of Johann Gutenberg’s (and Laurens Janszoon Coster’s) printing press.
They both seem to understand that simple, accessible, easy-to-use, free, and barrier-to-entry-free blogging would change the balance-of-power between Main Stream Media and the citizen population as drastically and with as much revolution as the Gutenberg Revolution.
Needless to say, this is scaring the hell out of the modern version of the pre-Gutenberg owners of the word, the journalist. With the firestorm that is the blogosphere and its citizen journalists, the noble priesthood known as the press, and the noble priest known as the reporter, no longer owns the news and can no longer define truth, story, action, fact, event, and culture with carte blanche.
Even as MSM tried to co-opt the We Media conference last week, it was all for naught. Of course we citizen journalists were not physically in London attending the We Media 2006 conference: we are generally not financed, we have not an expense account, and we aren’t accruing frequent flier miles.
Whether we were in attendence or not, we were there in spirit. We were breathing down the collar of your tweeds. While you were defending Main Stream Media’s reputation and future and suggesting that we can all get along, we were busy “printing Bibles” and handing them out for free.
