This article entitled Blog eats Blog is a facinating critique of the top “A” list bloggers and the recent O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Of course, it’s important that someone, somewhere tries to get a handle on the future, and we should be grateful to the assembled geeks and net gurus for taking time to do that. But we also need to ask some hard questions about the people behind the conference, and about the agenda and baggage that they carry with them.

Thompson looks carefully at the agenda, the baggage and the players.

Reading the blog coverage may not tell us much about what actually happened, but it does reveal something of interest. Within the blogosphere, we can identify some that belong to a new intellectual elite - a small influential group of people, who have managed to turn their self-publication obsession into a power base. It will come as no surprise that many of them either organised or spoke at the conference (4).

Howard Rheingold, Tim O’Reilly, Clay Shirky, Doc Searls, Dave Winer and Ben Hammersley (no, I’m not going to promote them even more by linking to them) are all what Register reporter Andrew Orlowski calls ‘the A-list bloggers’, the people whose regular musings on their personal websites can shape debate and make reputations (5). (Shirky may not have a conventional blog, preferring instead to post essays that are then linked to by others - but since his importance derives entirely from others’ blogs, I feel justified in including him in the list.)

There is a new word to add to a blog dictionary…blogeoisie.

These people are not quite an aristocracy. Perhaps they are simply the blogeoisie (pronounced bloj-wah-zee), a dominant class in network society. Or it may be simpler to think of blogs as a feudal system, with respect and links acting as the chief currency. The peasants toil in the low-rank blogs, paying their tithe in LazyWeb projects to the lords of the link in return for an occasional mention from Hammersley or Searls.

Where is Raed?
David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen casts a unswerving eye at the darling of Iraqi blogs.

What we can know, just by reading his blog, is that this Salam is up to no good. He is spreading “inside views” of the new Iraq, not only to the blogosphere, but directly among the journalists still encamped at the Meridian (formerly Palestine, formerly Meridian) hotel. Not the “embeds” who’ve gone home after remarkable learning experiences, but those “hacks” not yet transferred to the next breaking news story, and so still kicking around this mysterious city of Baghdad, trying to figure out what’s happening without exposing themselves overmuch to danger.

And they lap it up. They depend on translators and guides to show them around, and seem only partially aware that the people who’ve come forward to provide them with these services are almost all unemployed former Baath regime officials. (They trust them because they speak English so well.)

At least there is some good news.

My own information is that the sudden U.S. staff changes, and arrival of Paul Bremen (a former counterterrorism official) as the new civilian chief administrator, reflect an important policy change. The U.S., through its characteristically lateral methods of trial and error, has discovered that playing a low profile was a mistake; and that actual “ordinary” Iraqis want to see more rather than less of them, providing more rather than less security. This they will get.

Private Jessica Lynch
The BBC will air a documentary this weekend blowing the Hollywood image making human interest spin on the rescue of an American soldier out of the proverbial water. This backgrounder hi-lights the tensions and differences between the British and American military and news coverage.

But the American media tactics, culminating in the Lynch episode, infuriated the British, who were supposed to be working alongside them in Doha, Qatar. This Sunday, the BBC’s Correspondent programme reveals the inside story of the rescue that may not have been as heroic as portrayed, and of divisions at the heart of the allies’ media operation.

“In reality we had two different styles of news media management,” says Group Captain Al Lockwood, the British army spokesman at central command. “I feel fortunate to have been part of the UK one.”

One story, two versions and some twists.

The Internet
So why is the Internet dying?