ABSTRACT
We are experiencing an unprecedented era of information expansion. Preexisting work is moving online, but it is new content that fuels the explosion. The blogosphere is a part of that. Individuals who had ideas but no convenient platform to reach a wider audience now have the opportunity and are taking advantage of it by the millions. There are two primary ways for legacy media to cope with the massive influx of new content producers. One is to denigrate the content and its authors and hope the mass audience ignores it. This, predictably, was the dominant approach of mainstream media in the early 2000s. Blog content was depicted as trivial, mostly navel-gazing, and when serious topics were addressed, the writing was amateurish, filled with errors and not credible. Blog writers were seen as relatively unsophisticated people sitting at their computers in their underwear.
