Did You Read the Post?

An interesting post at The Mu Life about how people don't read posts on sites like Digg, but judge them by the ethereal meta-data they carry. I would carry it one step further by saying that there is a fantastic prejudice on some sites against blogs in general, and it's not healthy.

If blogs are the op-ed pages of the 21st century, and some of the most interesting commentary originates there, you can't automatically dismiss those pieces as amateur garbage without reading them. I've read great posts submitted to Digg that were dugg down by folks who obviously didn't read the source, saying "personal blog, no digg". While it's true that many personal blogs spew crap all over the place (like me!), you should at least give the first paragraph a read before you pass judgement on something.

I find it funny how people tout Digg as the replacement for big media newspapers, putting control of the stories back in the hands of the public... and at the same time they refuse to grant the slightest shred of credibility to writers who don't collect a paycheque from old media enterprises like the New York Times.

Or, put another way: don't judge a book by its cover, and certainly not just by the URL you found it at.

Update: Excellent follow-up and further exploration at isolationism.com. I didn't actually read it all, I just wanted to be the first to link to it.

Update 2: I kid! I kid!