“Blogola” and other ways of skirting those pesky elites

The WSJ has two interesting articles today on the empowered grass-roots culture that’s replacing those annoying gatekeeper elites we’re all so sick of. The first is available here. It’s about TV networks blowing off critics and newspaper writers and buttering up bloggers — sorry, focusing on “blog outreach.” After all, as the Journal notes, mainstream media writers a often restricted from accepting freebies that might influence their coverage. Happily, the honest and transparent grass roots have no such rules.

Giving away DVDs is a cheap way to curry favor, but some networks are courting bloggers with Hollywood’s true currency: access. Fox News Channel says it recently thought about trying to flatter a New York Times writer with an invitation to an industry dinner hosted by President Bush. Instead, Fox says it sent invites to several New York media blogs — outlets it considered to be of more strategic importance.

Bloggers often return home with pinwheels in their eyes…. Indeed, some blog writers are even happy to let networks play editor. “I hope you like it,” wrote [one blogger who had been invited onto the set of a sitcom] in an email to CBS to flag her “Old Christine” posting. “If there’s anything you’d like me to add, just tell me and I will.” She signed the note, “XOXO.”

The best part? “Network PR experts say blogs are important because they often serve as idea farms for professional reporters.”

And why shouldn’t they, hm?

To all of this I can only add that the same basic practices are, I suspect, extremely common with product and cool-shit blogs. When not busy trumpeting the new transparency, I have a feeling that many such bloggers are positively raking in the free merch. It’s hard for me to say for certain, of course, since they very rarely disclose policies regarding such matters. (Allow me to transparently reiterate that I obviously do not accept freebies.)

Anyway, the other story is about “features like most-viewed, most-popular and most-emailed lists” that theoretically “democratize news and information, advocates say, letting consumers play a role in what’s deemed worthy of others’ attention, taking it out of the hands of an unseen editorial elite.” Not surprisingly, these features can be gamed.

One interesting excerpt:

Online video sites face challenges as well, as people try to game the “view counts” for clips by using automated software to repeatedly click on videos. Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, has spotted spyware software that hijacks individuals’ Web browsers and makes them view specific videos on YouTube. Other spyware Mr. Edelman has documented forces users’ computers to visit a clip on YouTube and give it a top five-star rating.

“Our computers are so good at counting that we treat their answers as infallible, but they’re subject to gaming both through ordinary counting errors and through systematic attack,” says Mr. Edelman.