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Charlie Rose hosted a discussion last night about blogging. It included four popular bloggers: Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit, Ana Marie Cox from Wonkette, Andrew Sullivan & Joe Trippi, the campaign manager for former presidential candidate Howard Dean. Even tho these blogs are all politically-orientated, their impressions rang true with me. The first point they made was that blogs (via the Internet) allow contact with people much smarter than yourself. ••• continued ••• Altho my guides, such as the Ghost guide, and Guide to Ripping & Encoding CD audio, for example, aren't 'blogs' per se, they function in much the same way. Soon as they're posted, the mail starts coming in (from people much smarter than myself) telling me where I made a mistake, or where a clarification is needed. And I listen to them. And if you've been a reader here for any length of time, you know how many revisions they've gone thru. That's the reason the guides have become so popular. (Not because I am so smart.) It's this bringing-together of people with specialized knowledge that makes the Internet (in general) & blogging (in particular) so powerful. They also noted how it was bloggers who brought down Dan Rather (Rathergate). Within hours after airing the show about the infamous memo, bloggers (with specialize info) were calling the document a fake. They knew that typewriters back then didn't have a "th" superscript, and could tell the document had been created with Microsoft Word. The ironic thing is that the mainstream media tends to look down on bloggers, and when the blogosphere started reporting a problem, they tried their best to ignore it. But couldn't. One quote in particular stuck out, "Once you have an editor, it's no longer a blog." That's the beauty of blogs: you can say whatever you like. It's like thinking out loud. But if you're wrong more often than right, people will start to ignore you. Which is why I try to limit my comments to things for which I have first-hand experience, and qualify my opinions with a caveat that makes it clear they are simply that: mere opinions. I think the following fact is why blogs are getting so much attention, and why they're becoming a media force to be reckoned with. It's something my grandfather once told me. He said: No matter how smart you are, there will always be someone smarter. And no matter how much you know, there will always be someone who knows more. Blogs are tuning the media world upside down because (for the first time in history) they give voice (a far-reaching, real-time voice) to the person who knows more, who woukld otherwise remain obscure. And unlike the mass-media, he has no editor to dilute his ideas. |
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