Jeremy Druker, Editor-in-Chief of Transitions Online, has just sent an interesting article from The Economist’s World in 2006 print edition to the Global Voices mailing list. Interestingly, and especially after Global Voices Online’s recent conference in London at Reuters Headquarters, it’s on blogging. It’s also significant enough to post here.

The democratisation of information unleashed by the internet—now increasingly connected to mobile phones and other portable devices—has been gloriously chaotic. According to one count, 80,000 new blogs (online journals) are now created each day. But in 2006 more big companies will muscle in, and rules of sorts will start to spread.

Participatory information sites and channels will blossom, with citizen-reporters” busying themselves not only in writing and in sound through podcasting, but also with images using digital cameras and phones. As well as supplying leads and feeds for conventional media (witness the remarkable video images of the aftermath of last July’s London bombings captured by surviving passengers on their mobile phones), these will develop their own mass through their range of reporting. And as corporations follow the example of Microsoft and others in buying into the blogosphere, sites will emerge with resources far beyond those of the original individual exponents of the genre. These mega-blogs will become part of an interconnected information universe that will increasingly move editing from the traditional newsroom to the recipient’s computer.

The essence of the original blogs was that they were individual expressions of information and opinion, however eccentric or extreme. This raised an obvious credibility question. Some blogs may have been accurate, but many more clearly come off the wall. For every dissection of the CBS report on President Bush and the National Guard, we had 1,000 rants and 100,000 accounts of daily activities of interest to nobody except the author. The limits of the free-for-all were well demonstrated by the chaos that resulted when the Los Angeles Times opened its online editorial page to unrestricted contributions.

Such problems will encourage the growth of a more responsible online-information system that exploits the medium’s possibilities, but which also adheres to self-imposed standards that would have been seen as unacceptably restrictive by the original bloggers. The idea that the internet meant complete freedom will have to die in at least a part of the forest if the medium is to realise its potential as an information tool. Serious providers will have to accept that they are not free from responsibility.

This will not come about primarily through any legal constraints, which remain cloudy in the blogosphere. Rather, a group of information websites will emerge from the world of blogs—small in relative number, but weighty in impact—which accept that the internet is not just a licence to peddle prejudices and pursue individual interests. The hierarchy of links pioneered by Google will become a key factor, discriminating in the good sense between the reliable and the dross, and creating a virtuous online circle. Thus can brands be built.

This will present newspapers, already hit by declining circulations, with an extra challenge, and the growth of video and audio feeds from citizen-reporters will drive at least the smaller broadcasters to try to co-opt them as contributors. Conventional media enterprises will have to find creative ways of drawing on the proliferating sources of content and channels of distribution to satisfy their customers. If they do not adapt, fast, they may all too easily find themselves overshadowed as new media come of age, taking their responsibilities seriously and exploiting new ways of connecting with consumers.

Jonathan Fenby: editorial director, earlywarning.com