Day: January 3, 2003

Rafat Ali has a very interesting article on why 2003 might end up being the year Weblogs get bought up.

He suggests that rather than even being bought, a small number of very very popular webloggers might be taken on as salaried employees of some of the larger publishing houses. He also suggests some possible link-ups in the piece.

If you aren’t already looking at weblogs that are relevant to your industry or market segment, now might be a good time!

Boing Boing one of the most popular link weblogs, recently published their visitor numbers [Excel spreadsheet] – and any publisher would be very proud of similar readership numbers.

According to the numbers, Boing Boing gets over 200,000 unique visitors a month…. not bad for a web page.

This morning I was reading Dave Winer’s Scripting News as I do most mornings, and he had a post on an opinion article written in the New York Times by James Ledbetter.

Ledbetter is the business editor of Time Europe but is better known as the editor of the Industry Standard, a now defunct magazine that covered (and promoted) the New Economy. Dave’s post recommends we read Ledbetter’s piece “to to be reminded how the business press excused themselves and still do now, for the abuse of trust of their readers during the dot-com boom.”

I thought that he was being a little harsh on Ledbetter, particularly since I really enjoyed the Standard. But when I read Ledbetter’s piece, I felt myself agreeing with Dave. Ledbetter’s not apologising for misleading people with poor editorial judgement, instead he’s pushing the blame around the table and the usual suspects get a good kicking namely; his competitors, bankers and of course PR people.

I think Ledbetter made a mistake writing this piece. If you have a few moments compare his op-ed with a piece written by Joyce Slaton on the media’s role in the dot.com bubble. Her piece is honest, interesting and insightful. Ledbetter should have just published a link to it. [Comments]