Why the Press Got It Wrong

Tech Central Station ^ | 2/1/05 | Glenn Harlan Reynolds Published 02/01/2005

[paudio]

For some time, I've been predicting that the blogosphere would move more and more from punditry to newsgathering and reporting, in competition with (or at least in supplementation of) the traditional media. And that's been happening. We saw it with tsunami coverage, and now we're seeing it with reporting on the Iraqi elections.

Some of this was pre-arranged. The Iraqi-American nonprofit partnership, Friends of Democracy, set up a central weblog collecting reports from correspondents all over Iraq. There were audio and text reports, with photos, from many different locations, producing an effect something like a news wire staffed by avid amateurs.

[ultima ratio]

Great post.

[Jay777]

BUMP!

[Smartaleck]

Long time coming?

Not really. The first sharing of information came about in 1978 or so with the first BBS or Bulletin Board Service. In the 80's with the development of multi-nodes (a network if you will) and Windows several users could connect at once and share info.

As one site puts it...

By the end of the 1980's the BBS hobby was rapidly spreading and the number of computer bulletin boards began skyrocketing. The boards moved off of their IBM 286es and onto the 386 which followed it in early 1990. The size of hard disks tripled and the speed of modems quadrupled in less than 5 years. This greatly impacted the BBS community and we began to see systems with huge 500 MEG filebases and fast 9600 baud modems. By 1992 most BBSes were moving onto 486s and had upgraded their modems to 14.4's and their hard drives to 1 MEGGERS. The BBS community had expanded locally to an incredible 450 systems in St. Louis alone. Due to Wayne Bell's early seeding of the BBS community here the late 1980's, by the early 90's WWIV or World War IV BBS software was the most common BBS software to be found. Over 200 systems in St. Louis were running this software in 1992. Users in the BBS community would also encounter softwares such as Telegard (a WWIV clone), Renegade, Wildcat, PC-Board, VBBS, Remote Access and Maximus.

For the next 2 years (1992 to 1994) the BBS community would reach it's maximum growth. These were the best two years for the local BBS community in St. Louis.

In early 1995, Netscape began to appear on BBSes with this description: "Graphical Internet Browser makes the World Wide Web easy to navigate.".

(Prior to that the pioneers roamed the internet using tools like Telnet, Gophers and such trying to glean original documents so as to form their own opinions about about topics the MSN was reporting on.)

BBS's allowed users to share files and information and...report/share firsthand events.

Freerepublic started out in around 93-94 as several interested users began to share information on Prodigy about a guy in Arkansas with "funny goings on"....a mere 10 years ago.

It took a while as software and hardware leap frogged each other and each time giving users the ability to share more information faster.

As pointed out in the TechCentral article we've now reached "real time" reporting and an instant check on the MSM. Yeeeee Hah!