What “power” could blogs have? The first thing that comes to many people minds is the topic of the media. If blogs are important, they would say, it’s because they influence the media. That is, because they manage to coopt their agenda. There is nothing new about this; press agencies, non government organisations or politics have been doing it for quite a long time now.

But what’s the capability of blogs to stop depending on the media and to define their own agendas? At the end, they can reach their public in a more direct way, without having to depend on the journalistic apparatus. But, at least in an impressionist manner, what you currently see is that blogs are rather complementing the media; that is, they provide other points of view over the same agenda of news. Could this change with the consolidation of the so called “citizen journalism”? These kind of practices combine the journalistic method with the collaborative structure of blogs, but for now the topic is not clear enough as to get conclussions.

Do blogs return the power of expression to the public? At simple sight, anyone can start their own blog and write. But to take for granted that this will make them representatives of the “public opinion” (a construction that resembles others such as the “holy ghost”) is quite naive. For months now, public relations agencies and the media are thinking of how to coopt the phenomenom of blogs in their favor. There are huge sites, such as WikiNews, totally written by users. Will it follow the path of the software industry, where one application developed by a company has as many contributions from their paid employees as from the community? Imagine: a newspaper made by paid journalists -few of them- and readers/producers that charge a dime and are many. Media businessmen will begin to rub their hands together…

Rather than “power”, maybe we should be talking about the capability to establish public agendas. I think it’s a little simplist to believe that the influence potential of blogs can directly be related to how easy it is to create and maintain them (and take for granted that, because they’re easy to create, they have an innate democractic potential). Besides, it’s quite obvious that not all blogs are alike. The establishment of even more formalized parameters to distinguish them -pagerank, links, position in search engines- are creating a strong separation between consolidated sites and veterans and newest ones. This gap is going to be harder to break, even when every now and then a new blog manages to quickly attract attention. So, some bloggers will be able to establish and impulse agendas, while others will have to follow them or simply opt to stay out from the the world of the “most cited” blogs.

It’s true that, unlike the media, the capacity to impulse topics in the blogosphere is more disperse, less concentrated. But with the pass of time, we’ll surely have more reference points, rankings and diverse ponderation methods of results obtained in blogs -as the ones Technorati and IceRocket allow. Will these bloggers have a greater power to install topics? If you take into consideration that some of the most popular blogs in the United States already have more readers than some big newspapers, it would be naive to believe that things will continue as it has done so far. The question is, of course, if these successful blogs will end up being integrated to the mediatic system as we know it or if they’ll maintain a clear independence from them.

(Written for the III Carnaval de blogs, spanish only. This week’s topic: Blogs and power).