Jeff Jarvis, over at BuzzMachine, is doing a great job blogging the Ad:Tech conference (thank you Jeff!).
One of the comments he records from Nick Denton in his coverage of the Blogging Panel surprised me:
“…Someone at Salon asks what’s different about this: It’s just another medium. Nick says yes. I keep adding that one thing is different: It’s a conversation…”
So I do agree with Jeff here; what’s unique about blogging is the group behavior amongst loosely coupled participants (which manifests as conversations, meet-ups and other generally ‘communal’ behavioral patterns). No problems there.
But, to call blogging a new medium? I don’t think so. A new mechanism for using the existing Internet medium? Yes.
Goodness knows I’m all for blogging, meta-data publishing, micro-content and whatever else we want to label this stuff. But blogging is an activity done on an existing medium, not a new medium unto itself.