Wired released its 2005 wish list, with plenty of insightful suggestions. One which particularly struck me was that bloggers shouldn't just rehash news from other media, but instead create their own news.
It makes a lot of sense.
While it could be helpful to provide a thematic aggregator service and point to articles that readers may have missed on other publications, a copy-and-paste authoring style adds little value to a topic one would like to promote or share.
As a New Year resolution, I am pledging to publish here as much original content as possible.
2 comments:
But what is "news" anyway?
If you follow Wired's argument to its logical conclusion, then all we will be left with is press releases. Surely Wired themselves simply "re-hash" news pushed to them every single day. Sounds to me like they, like every other mainstream media outlet, are feeling threatened by the rise of blogging, and are trying to take a superior position.
There is a big difference between "re-hashing" and "interpreting". I, for one, actually like the fact that blogs give the rest of us the opportunity to provide our take on what the mainstream media is pushing at us.
And that is what makes a good blog. It doesn't matter what your sources are - other blog posts, newspaper articles, newsgroup rumours, whatever. What is important is how well you express your opinion about what questions or conclusions you draw.
You don't have to post "original content" to be original.
I agree with the "anonymous". I think a blog should offer for sure original content, created by the blog author, as well as comments and interpretations of articles/news to be read through a link. From time to time of course can be useful to highlight external content just to provide the reader with something he could have missed, but I agree that tha effort has to be in that direction.
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