Agreed, Chris. You and I have talked before , I believe, about the risks of a world where people can choose to hear only the news and viewpoints they want to hear. It sounds good in principle until you start to see how it works in practice, where people become convinced that the viewpoint they have chosen to listen to is THE viewpoint.

I think that’s a real problem, a real risk. But the idea in the source article is that the marketing gurus will be able to control/direct people because they somehow “understand” everyone better than geeks is a different issue, and I think the source article is missing the point. I think the problem marketers face with Blogs is that people see a blog as a communal thing- more like gathering around the water cooler than reading a newspaper. They will frequent a blog where the poster(s) speak to them, using their language, about their interests. Geeks understand geeks better than marketers, and they can speak to other geeks with an honest voice. If Joe Marketer sets up Geek-O-Rama, people might go there but they’ll soon realize its really a marketing site, not a blog. This won’t ultimately diminish the congregation of geeks at the “real” geek sites (or the pin collecting cross dressing neo-Nazis at their sites…). Now…if you create a blog that has a larger potential collection of interested people, you will probably attract a larger percentage of the overall “world of blogging”…but not because you are somehow cooler, smarter, or a better people person. Instead, it will be because you appeal to a more common set of interests.

To me, the original article stated the obvious (“geeks are a niche community”), then said (in essence) that people with more broadly based interests must perforce be smarter and more people centric. That doesn’t fly. More people like TV than like quantum physics, but the “TV liking demographic” and the people who write for it aren’t necessarily smarter/wiser/cooler.