News this morning is that AOL is going down the path already cleared by companies like Demand Media and Associated Content, and getting into the business of commissioning small content “piecework” based on consumer interest as gauged by search queries (and advertiser interest as gauged by keyword prices).

In other words: if you know people are searching for “how do I fix a flat tire?”, you crank out a quick web page, SEO it up, and sit back. As long as you make a little more cash from the search ads on the page than you spent on the writing, you’ve got yourself a business model. It’s an “automated story factory,” as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD puts it.

This sweatshop approach to content creation is, of course, anathema to old-fashioned writers and editors. It raises all sorts of disturbing questions about the advertising cart leading the editorial horse (as PaidContent suggests). It holds no appeal to me, personally. It is the polar opposite of what most bloggers do: For the most part they remain — as I argued in Say Everything and as the most recent Technorati survey continues to show — motivated by their own interests and passions, not by the fleeting prospect of fame or revenue.

And yet, as my knee jerks instinctively against the “crank out just-good-enough content” approach, I also start to wonder, why isn’t some enterprising old-media company doing something like this to support its newsroom? If this is the way advertising revenue works on the Web today, why not exploit it for yourself? Why let the AOLs and Demand Medias own the pie? If there are advertising vs. editorial issues to be navigated, why wouldn’t traditional editors and publishers want a say in how they’re resolved?

This is the sort of thing I was imagining when I wrote, earlier this year, that media companies should start from the revenue side in order to figure out new models for supporting the socially important but economically imperiled work of journalism.

Certainly, the New York Times or Time magazine aren’t going to want to sully their brands with such stuff — but why not create a new down-market brand owned by the same company?

Most freelance writers have, for their own survival, always resorted to a parallel strategy: they do high-paying but not always fulfilling work part of the time so they can do work that they enjoy but that doesn’t necessarily pay the bills the rest of the time.

While SEO-driven piecework doesn’t pay well per page, collectively it appears to generate real profit. That money can go to fill an entrepreneur’s wallet, but it could also fund journalism. Maybe that’s what Tim Armstrong plans at AOL: let the generic junk pay the salaries of old-fashioned journalists he’s hiring. Why wouldn’t the owner of an old-line newsroom do the same thing? Why haven’t they done so already?

UPDATE: Danny Sullivan connects the dots: AOL et al. are finding ways to make money from those search visitors that newspaper companies have lately been dismissing as worthless.

Just a note for those of you in the area: Come on down to the UC Berkeley School of Journalism this Wednesday, Nov. 4, at 6 p.m. if you’d like to hear me give a talk about blogging, journalism, and MediaBugs.

There will be only a little overlap with the talks I’ve been giving about Say Everything and the history of blogging (like my Hillside Club presentation over the summer).

This time, as befits the forum, I’ll be looking at the roots and nature of the long history of confrontation between professional journalists and bloggers, pointing out some positive directions that may lead us beyond the now well-worn grooves of that conflict, and offering some introductory perspectives about MediaBugs and how it fits in to that larger narrative.

I hope to see lots of you there! Details here.

Mark Bowden is a seriously good reporter, and his piece in the new Atlantic, “The Story Behind the Story,” is one that every student of today’s mutating media should read. Bowden traces the route by which the soundbite that came to define, though not derail, Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination entered the media bloodstream. I can wholeheartedly recommend the reporting in Bowden’s piece, but I must take issue with some of his interpretation.

The “wise Latina” clip, it turns out, was first unearthed by a conservative blogger named Morgen Richmond and published on his blog, called VerumSerum. And the problem with that, Bowden suggests, is that Richmond, being a partisan in search of ammunition rather than a journalist in search of truth, presented it to the world without making an effort to understand it or put it in context — to see that, in fact, Sotomayor wasn’t saying anything that outrageous at all: As Bowden puts it, “Her comment about a ‘wise Latina woman’ making a better judgment than a ‘white male who hasn’t lived that life’ referred specifically to cases involving racial and sexual discrimination.”

Bowden credits Richmond as “a bright and fair-minded fellow,” but argues that his “political bias made him tone-deaf to the context and import of Sotomayor’s remarks. Bear in mind that he was looking not simply to understand the judge, but to expose her supposed hidden agenda.”

…he makes no bones about his political convictions or the purpose of his research and blogging. He has some of the skills and instincts of a reporter but not the motivation or ethics. Any news organization that simply trusted and aired his editing of Sotomayor’s remarks, as every one of them did, was abdicating its responsibility to do its own reporting. It was airing propaganda. There is nothing wrong with reporting propaganda, per se, so long as it is labeled as such. None of the TV reports I saw on May 26 cited VerumSerum.com as the source of the material, which disappointed but did not surprise Richmond and Sexton.

The trouble with all this is that Bowden is focusing his ire on the wrong people. Richmond is not, as far as I know, claiming to be a journalist — and yet, as Bowden admits, he is actually “fair-minded” enough to feel that the Sotomayor quote was maybe not that big a deal. Surely the failure here is on the part of the TV news organizations that turned it into a marquee soundbite without looking more deeply into it. Wasn’t that their job, their process, their vetting — the safeguard that ostensibly distinguishes them from the unwashed blogging masses? Aren’t they the ones who are supposed to be after truth rather than scalps?

Blogs may have helped accelerated gotcha journalism, but hit pieces and skeletons-in-closets existed long before their advent. The partisan warfare around Clarence Thomas’s nomination far outdid the Sotomayor hearings, and Anita Hill’s charges — whatever your view of them — required no blog posts to ignite their conflagration. The Web has crowdsourced opposition research, but the conflicts that motivate it have been around for ages.

It is television that creates soundbites; the Web at least allows for far more context and nuance, though it does not always deliver them. I do not understand how Bowden could fail to see this. He writes (of Richmond and his co-bloggers):

I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.

“The blogger’s role is to help his side.” This is sometimes true, but no more definitive than to say, “The TV newsperson’s role is to help his side.” It is a broad-brush dismissal of an entire class of writers who are actually far more diverse in their goals and techniques. It is no more accurate than the carping of the extremists (of both left and right) who tar all “MSM” journalists with the sins of a minority of hacks or ideologues. It’s disheartening to see a writer of Bowden’s stature placing himself on that level.

There are pundits and news-show hosts who earn our trust as straight shooters, and there are others for whom partisanship plainly trumps truth. There are reporters who aim to shoot straight, and others who hide their own blatant partisanship behind a scrim of ersatz objectivity. In the end, all we can do is find individuals and institutions who, based on their record and their willingness to show their process, seem to place truth ahead of “victory.” Such individuals and institutions are no rarer on the Web, and among bloggers, than among the old guard of journalism. If the public is being ill-served by echo-chamber coverage and shallow sound-bite gotcha clips, the cable news channels bear primary responsibility. Bowden’s own narrative of the Sotomayor “story behind the story” is just the latest demonstration.

BONUS LINK: Here’s Richmond’s thoughtful response to Bowden.

The story of the rise of Blogger from the ashes of a dotcom startup to the largest blogging service in the world takes up a whole chapter in Say Everything. So when Rick Klau of Google’s Blogger team invited me to participate in a panel as part of Blogger’s 10th birthday celebration, I was happy to accept.

Last night I took a seat to talk about where blogging has been and where it’s going alongside Rick and his colleage Siobhan Quinn; prominent tech blogger (and Blogger user) Louis Gray; Blogher cofounder Jory des Jardins; Blogger and Twitter founder Evan Williams; and Twitter cofounder Biz Stone (who long ago worked at the early blog network Xanga and also worked on Blogger after it was acquired by Google).

Klau gave us some Blogger numbers to chew on:

• Between 9 and 10 million “active contributors” (within past 30 days) to Blogger sites — this includes posts and comments. “7-day active contributors” have doubled over the last two years.
• “Active readers (30-day)” (which I assume is some version of what we think of as “monthly uniques”) is now over 300 million.
• 270,000 words written each minute on Blogger — 388 million words a day. About a quarter trillion words written on Blogger since its 1999 launch. (“Some of those,” Biz Stone deadpanned, “might have been cut-and-pasted.”)

He also announced a new partnership between Blogger and Socialvibe, which channels charitable contributions from web pages.

Jory Des Jardins shared some of the research from Blogher: bloggers on that network cite top motivations as “fun,” “self-expression,” and “networking.” Making money always takes last place on these lists, she said.

Klau talked about how Google itself uses blogs (more than 100 now), and now Twitter as well, to talk with its users. (I remember Google’s earliest days, when it really didn’t talk with anyone at all, beyond a handful of media folks.) He also discussed efforts to clean up the Blogspot hosted service, which a couple of years ago had developed the reputation of a spam-ridden “not nice neighborhood.” Today, he said, the percentage of spam page views on Blogspot has declined to “the low single digits.”

Williams recalled the moment, a year or two after the introduction of Blogger, when its creators began to imagine the possibility of a world in which every company and every politician would have their own blog: “At the time, these were crazy ideas.”

Stone pointed out the subtle transition in our understanding of blogging implicit in Blogger’s switch from the “Powered by Blogger” slogan at the bottom of users’ pages to “I power Blogger.”

I reminded people of the irony that, even though Blogger today is known as the sort of Everyman’s blog service, for its first year, it required that you host your own domain in order to use it. That made it tough for everyday people to use it, but perfect for the early-adopter blog-geek crowd — people who already had their own domains, didn’t want to give them up, but appreciated the convenience of Blogger’s publishing tool. This approach — enthrall the in-crowd first, then make it easy for everyone else to join in — turns out to be a very effective formula for startup growth, even if, in Blogger’s case, it was more stumbled upon than planned in advance.

None of this will do you any good, to be sure, unless what you’re offering has some intrinsic appeal and value. Blogger most certainly did, and does — along with all its progeny, including Movable Type and Wordpress, all of which together have made posting your words on the Web a thing of once-impossible-to-imagine ease today.

UPDATE: Anthony Ha at VentureBeat posted about the event.

Has the word “blogger” become meaningless?

Consider this item (from Mediabistro’s Fishbowl LA):

We asked [Jay] Rosen what he thought of the term “blogger” and how there is not a word to distinguish a journalist who blogs and a numbnut who blogs.

“Blogger will become such a broad term it will lose all meaning,” he told FBLA.

Rosen later elaborated on Twitter:

We don’t say “Emailer James Fallows,” even though he uses email. Eventually, it will be the same with the term “blogger.”

Let’s unpack this.

“Blogger” confuses us today because we’ve conflated two different meanings of “blogging.” There is the formal definition: personal website, reverse chronological order, lots of links. Then there is what I would call the ideological definition: a bundle of associations many observers made with blogs in their formative years, having to do with DIY authenticity, amateur self-expression, defiant “disintermediation” (cutting out the media middleman), and so on.

Today professional journalism has embraced the blog form, since it is a versatile and effective Web-native format for posting news. But once you have dozens of bloggers at the New York Times, or entire media companies built around blogs, the ideological trappings of blogging are only going to cause confusion.

Still — wary as I am of taking issue with Rosen, whose prescience is formidable — I don’t think we will see the term “blogger” fade away any time soon. There’s a difference between a term that’s so broad it’s lost all meaning and a term that has a couple of useful meanings that may conflict with each other.

After all, we still use the word “journalist,” even though it has cracked in two (“journalist” as professional label vs. “journalist” as descriptor of an activity). This is where human language (what programmers call “natural language”) differs from computer languages: our usage of individual words changes as it records our experience with their evolving meanings.

In other words, the multiple meanings of the word “blogger” may bedevil us, but they also tell a story.

Say Everything is getting around. Here’s some links to recent coverage and related stuff:

My two favorite speaking gigs about the book are now both online. Fora.tv was there at the Hillside Club in Berkeley a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the video, in which you can, among other things, hear my “Top Ten Myths About Blogging”:

Also online now is a slightly different version of the same talk, which I gave at Microsoft Research earlier in July. Microsoft does a neat trick with timing the video and the presentation slides — but, warning, it will only work in IE.

Todd Bishop of Seattle’s TechFlash did a nice in-depth Q&A with me:

Q: What have blogs meant in the evolution of the Internet?

Rosenberg: I identify blogging as the first mass experience of having a read-write web or a two-way web or a user-generated web – all these terms mean the same thing. They mean a web that we create ourselves. 1994, 1995 was when people first saw browsers and got excited, and it took a good five, seven, eight years from that point for blogs to show people, this is what that vision is about – this is what it looks like when anyone can contribute..

Other Q&As are at Time.com, by Dan Fletcher. (But, hey, Time, what’s with the little red links every couple of paragraphs? Pretty crude.) And over at the NewsHour’s Art Beat blog, by Chris Amico. Also in Reason, by Jesse Walker:

Reason: Of the ’90s pioneers you write about in the first section of the book, are there any that you feel haven’t really gotten their due?

Rosenberg: In a way, that whole era is unjustly forgotten. The tech industry and indeed the online world have very little memory of history. One of my purposes in writing the book was to get it down while it’s still fresh in my mind, everyone’s still around to interview, and the pages can still be hauled out of the Internet Archive.

The Web moves really quickly, and we’ve had several generations of excitement. Today we have Twitter and Facebook and all of that, and people are having experiences in which they feel that they’re doing things for the first time. But nearly all of these experiences are things that people went through in the ’90s or the early part of the 2000s, whether it was revealing too much of your life and getting in trouble, or dreaming of some sort of utopia where we can all express ourselves and never get into fights. Telling those stories just seemed important.

On the review front, we’ve been in Business Week (“Gracefully written and well researched, Say Everything captures the drama of blogging’s rapid-fire rise”), the Seattle Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall St. Journal.

Then there is Andrew Keen’s review, in the Barnes and Noble Review:

Rosenberg criticizes mogul Barry Diller for suggesting that talent remains the one scarcity in today’s media. But this book is a glitteringly subversive argument against Rosenberg’s own thesis. It’s a beautifully written and meticulously fair narrative about the past, present, and future of the blog. Only somebody with Rosenberg’s incomparable ability could have written Say Everything. We are lucky to have his unique talent.

My point about Diller, of course, was never meant to suggest that talent is or has become widespread or universal. Rather, I took issue with the media exec’s smug attitude that the old world he inhabits already does a thorough job of locating and rewarding talent. But, er, I’d be foolish to argue too strenuously here!

I’m also grateful to all the bloggers who’ve posted about the book so far, including, but certainly not limited to, J.D. Lasica, Peter Merholz, Rafe Colburn, Paul Kedrosky (“funny, authoritative, full of great-great stories and anecdotes, and admirably even-handed”), Rogers Cadenhead, Ed Cone, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis, John McDaid, and Scott Carpenter (“An amazing job… It is a real joy to find a book like this one, where I can fall under its spell as I increasingly trust the author to tell a good tale”).

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of talking about Say Everything with Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum. I don’t think I fully infected Michael with my enthusiasm for bloggers and their place in our culture, but I was grateful for the rare opportunity this show (and host) provides to dig really deeply into a subject over the course of an hour.

One of my arguments is that blogs — so long derided as trivial — are actually the format we employ today when we want to go deep into any subject or topic. Forum and blogs: separated at birth?

Here’s the audio from the show:

A lot of people have flagged Benedict Carey’s piece in yesterday’s Times, “In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable,” and with good reason: it’s a fascinating report on research into the way the brain combines visual data and emotional responses to shape the sort of instant-gut-reaction decisions that soldiers make as they evaluate threats.

The examples the piece draws on are from U.S. soldiers’ experiences in Iraq, where every stray boulder or trashheap by the roadside could be hiding a deadly bomb.

Reading Carey’s story, I thought of parallels in the distinctly less lethal — but still occasionally perilous — informational environment of the Web. What are the little signals that tell us, “You can trust this page”? And what are the red flags that tell us, “Watch out, something’s off here”?

These are important. Of course, they can help us protect ourselves from outright scammers (phishers who build lookalike bank websites to try to steal your passwords, and so on). But they can also help us sift and sort through the news and information that flows through our browsers, focusing on the good and discarding the bad.

Some of these signals are glaringly obvious (no “About” page? come on!). Others are subtler (are the writer’s arguments logical? Are statements of fact documented by links?).

What are some of the tools you use? I’ll be teaching a workshop this coming weekend as part of the Stanford Professional Publishing Course, and would love to hear your suggestions.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday, July 29) at 7:30 pm, I’m speaking about Say Everything at the Hillside Club here in Berkeley. The event is sponsored by Berkeley Arts and Letters and also by the Berkeley Cybersalon, a series that I have been attending, in various forms, for 15 years now.

Also, it looks like I’m going to be on KQED Forum this Thursday morning at 10 AM — listen in, call in, ask me interesting questions!

Finally, this week I’m guest-blogging over at the Powell’s Books site. My first post was all about why I wrote Say Everything as a book and not a blog. (I assumed this would be sort of obvious — but as my Powell’s piece was being posted, the Wall Street Journal published a review arguing that my book “would have worked better as a blog.” So go figure.)

In my second Powell’s post, I look at what “master narratives” we can find in the story of the rise of blogging.

Blog historian Rudolf Ammann has done it again. First he pointed out that my statement in Say Everything that Cameron Barrett’s original blogroll had not been archived was inaccurate. Now he has dug up links to most of the original content in Dan Gillmor’s pioneering EJournal blog for the San Jose Mercury News, beginning in 1999. (Here’s a link to Gillmor’s very first post, in October 1999.) Based on Gillmor’s comments to me in an interview for the book, along with my own failed efforts to find them, I’d concluded that these pages were not available on the Web in any form.

I’m delighted that another little slice of Web history turns out to be available; grateful, once more to the amazing Internet Archive, for saving so much of our collective past and making it available via the “Wayback Machine”; and making a mental note to myself to try many more alternate domains when hitting a wall in archive searches.

I am no slouch in the ways of the Wayback Machine, but I tip my hat to Ammann, who is plainly a more adept archival sleuth than I am!