Andy and Seth, sorry: I was trying to be funny. Failure, as always. The joke was the connection between girrl revolutions in Japan (dojinshi) and blogs. It wasn’t serious.

But more importantly, Andy, I am really surprised you didn’t understand that your piece dumps. It’s not terribly harsh, and it is interesting. But I thought its tone was clear, whatever your intent. And if your intent is so separate from your tone, that may well explain alot.

I spend a great deal of time down playing the significance of blogs to my friends — if by significance you mean the percentage of the world participating. (One person wrote me — “see, blogs show why you don’t need to worry about MediaCon.” Right.) But again, to think that “significance” is captured by ratings is to miss something.

The Korean media conglomerates (chaebol) practiced self-censorship. Really. Every masthead said Chosun Ilbo or whatever subscribed to the code of self-censorship for Korean newspapermen. The red badge of boredom. Info came down from Yonhap (sorta like China’s Xinua, only the mainland coastal cities are already bigger risk-takers in some ways than my colleagues were), and what was approved went in, what was not approved did not go in, and that was pretty much that.

The journalists themselves were rotated in and out of the various papers, and encouraged to do boosterism (like when Samsung got pressured to start making cars, on account of, you know, national pride or something), all the papers talked about what a wonderful thing this was: look out Japan; first Sony, then Toyota! I had one guy say to me he wasn’t going to do a good job on this four-page advertising blowout special (Kiwanis or somebody had a convention in Seoul), because, you know, the organization hadn’t bought enough ad space, and as an employee he was offended. His boss approved of his conduct.

That was the news, actually: government-approved stuff, wacky tabloid bits from afar (Keanu Reeves marrying David Geffen), and advertiser-driven biz reporting.

Things changed quite dramatically in the later years of Kim Young Sam, and particularly under Dae Jung (the trial of Roh Tae Woo being the hallmark of change), but the people don’t wholly trust what they read, even now, and were primed to believe in themselves as news sources.

Disclaimer: my hours were cut back harshly at the Korea Times after I was a bit too enthusiastic in supporting a young, enthusiastic sportswriter type (who had a headline “Indians scalp Rangers 7-3” that I let run without consulting the big boss). The stated reason for the force-him-to-quit was my presence “disturbed the women,” but that’s maybe another story.

I see some potential harms to blogging, but none so significant as to outweigh the benefit from those blogs that do serve a purpose grander than random exegesis on diurnal events.

That begs the question, why are we seeing such a negative tone? Is the author offended by some bloggers claims to be the source of an information revolution? Wouldn’t it be more apropos to ignore the phenomenon, if you truly believed it had no chance of success?

-kd