Borg Journalism

Borg Journalism - We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated. - Microcontent News, a Corante.com Microblog
Here's an interesting article about blogs as borgs. The analogy doesn't quite work for me (I'd say the old print journalism has reached a form of "collective mind" akin to Borgs in that it seems so highly controlled, so much the same, coming from the same sources, repeating the same story (Remember that multivocal "Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant.") Blogs are individual voices (except of course, as the author says, when people steal your comments and put them on their own blogs (like I'm doing!). I am Borg.

"Star Trek's Federation of Planets faced its greatest challenge in the Borg, a race of cyborgs (half human/half-machine) who assimilate alien life forms into their collective. Like an army of ants, the Borg Collective possesses a shared consciousness infused with a ferocious determination to crush their enemy, at any cost.

Weblogs aren't nearly so malevolent, and most bloggers get the warm fuzzies when they think about online content. But allow me to share the flip side of the story: if you're a journalist trying to break news, Blogs are the new Borg.

Blogs relentlessly track down every scrap of news, assimilating it into the Blog Collective hive-mind with stunning efficiency. It doesn't stop there: individual blogs each add a small insight to the story, drawing on their personal experience and contributing to the conversation. Then the conversation takes over, exploring every possible implication and insight with a ferocity that astounds."

An update comment (September 26): Screenshots....Blogs give Dan Rather '60+1 Minutes': The "Borg bloggers" challenge and expose received news...