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There is a lot of talk these days about the emergence of media published by regular folks as opposed to the walled off “news organizations” that have provided us with “news” over the past few decades. Jeff Jarvis’ Buzz Machine is a blog that covers this issue fairly well from a unique perspective. Jarvis straddles the line of blogger and media insider.

Big media still doesn’t seem to get blogs, they dismiss them while at the same time lamely trying to cash in on their trendiness, by, get this, having talking heads read blogs on T.V. They recycle tired leftover textural content that isn’t good enough for publication on their main sites, newspapers, and magazines and repackage them as “blogs”.

But blogs and news are only the beginning. Pod casts, while dismissed as “Wayne’s World for radio“, are a huge step forward for citizen publishers. Not only do they provide an easy way to distribute audio content, they “tag” that info with meta information so that this binary file full of audio information is searchable and categorizable. Video is next.

Back in March I blogged about the extinction of network programmers that decide when and what you get to watch on T.V. - How much cooler would it be to subscribe ( for a small monthly fee ) to Jack Black’s “blog” and get an RSS feed containing members only links to all of the audio and video he has created and released over the last month then it is subscribing to HBO to catch his show, and going to Tower Records to buy the latest piece of plastic released by Tenacious D? How many new artists, musicians, and comics will be discovered over the next decade because they self publish on the ‘Net?

I was talking to the guys the other day and said “every site should be a blog” and got the requisite sighs and rolling of the eyes. Although I was trying to be provocative, what I was really talking about is that every website should have the tools that blog sites do. They should be able to ping sites and software to notify them that they have been updated, they should have rel tags built into links, they should be able to do trackbacks, etc.

Blogging software empowers users with little technical skills to publish on the web. Bloggers don’t have to worry with FTP, HTML, CSS, etc. to publish - and while that upsets some geeks, so does most everything else ( like websites with images :^> ). I want the next Richard Prior to podcast. I want the next Pearl Jam to find its audience through its blog, I want the next Vonnegut to publish his book on the web one chapter at a time and get compensated through paypal.