The view from Silicon Valley

Sometimes you might take pen in hand, the better to put your thoughts on paper. These days, you're just as likely to take up a keyboard and put those thoughts in a word processor. Regardless of appliance, the outcome is often the same: banality, cliché, truism and worse. And thanks to the internet, we can make our drivel available to millions of others. A web server is a printing press, the cheapest one the world has ever known.

And I know what I'm talking about here. I'm a weblogger – "blogger" for short. I'm one of maybe hundreds of thousands who regale the planet hourly with poetry, quotations, political rant, photographs,character assassination, even, occasionally, interesting gossip. It's as if the internet has finally given us the means to test the theory that if an large enough number of monkeys pound away randomly at keyboards for long enough, eventually Hamlet will appear.

The problem is that humans don't exhibit sufficiently random behavior. Hamlet will probably never appear on a weblog. But this isn't to say that genuinely interesting content doesn't appear. Indeed, a number of keen, respected observers say weblogs are beginning to usurp the franchises of legit media. How can it be that some unknown with a web page can scoop a mighty, trusted media outlet?

My only clue is from a conversation that took place in the office of the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner in 1994. William Randolph Hearst III, then the occupant of said office, is a bright, engaging guy. Sensing an opportunity unlikely to be repeated, I challenged him to launch www.examiner.com for free. "Great idea, Chris" said Mr Hearst. "We'll save millions on printing and delivery costs.

"But I have one problem. In the past, talented people have had to come to me and work cheap, since I could afford the presses, trucks, labour contracts and so forth. In this new world, you could just put up gulker.com, and cut me out of the picture." So, a week later, I did put up gulker.com. Hearst's response: "See, I told you!"

You can fly through the links of the "blogosphere" and find just the news or ideayou want. It's personal, and it preserves serendipity (finding stuff by chance) – a valuable attribute of any information system.

But here's the crux. Many tech reporters get their leads from weblogs – and that'll only increase. Some of the best writers alive publish free weblogs. The blogosphere is exploding in size; old media is not. Yet some equate weblogs with CB radio: a fad for the disenfranchised.

"Doc" Searls (http://doc.web logs.com) prefers to say that blogs are like a forest, while old media organisations are like a pyramid. They're built differently, they do different things. But you can't plant a pyramid. And how many new pyramids do you see these days?

cg@gulker.com