On the Dick Gerphadt thread, i made a comment about how pissed off the blogosphere was about it all but a doper claimed that blogs have no power whatsoever and dismissed them as a bunch of whiners. My question is: Do you think the blogs out there actually have power to influence events? I remember Glenn Reynolds giving the blogosphere credit for bringing down Trent Lott. What do you guys think? Do they have any power?
I think the blogosphere has the power to dispel an obvious lie that is being papered over by someone in power. The Trent Lott affair is a good example. Without the blogosphere, there would have been little or no fuss about his atrocious statement.
Howell Raines is another example. Poynter on line was a site where Times employees could publicly complain about mismanagement. Without the blogosphere, chances are Raines would have kept his job.
Clinton’s impeachment was due in no small measure to conservative sites, particularly Free Republic. The Republican Party had little desire to actually press forward with an impeachment. They were forced to do so by right-wingers on the web.
I think the power of the blogs comes from who reads them. Far fewer people read Drudge or Instapundit than watch TV news. Nowever, many of the movers and shakers read these sites. Thus these sites can have considerable influence, but their influence depends on whether their influential readers believe them.
It’s interesting to speculate about the future. As more and more people spend more and more time on the web, it would seem likely that blogs’ influence might grow rapidly.
I’m not so sure it’s the “blogosphere,” per se, so much as it is the net itself. Ten years ago, all you had access to was your local TV news and your local paper, plus the mass-market viewpoints of national network TV news, cable TV news and national publications. There wasn’t much room for alternative viewpoints.
The net lets you get more of these viewpoints out. Sure, blogs are one way, and probably the most sophisticated way. But before them, there were message boards and good ol’ Google searches, where you could locate news sources that wouldn’t otherwise have the capital to widely report on stories that the folks at CNN or FoxNews don’t think would boost ratings sufficiently.
Maybe the easy access to information that the net affords will help change the face of politics. I sure hope so. It’s not without its drawbacks: rumors and innuendo can spread quickly, even more quickly than they used to. Of course, rumor has always traveled much faster than fact, so with facts moving that much faster, maybe it balances out. But, just as ever, rumor remains much more interesting than fact.
I’ve got a blog and I don’t have a huge following on it, but there are those who read it, and it does its own bit of good, I guess, if only for me. There are other blogs that get much more traffic, and I’m sure they’re the ones who fuel the outrage. But in all, it’s the net itself, even if the blog had never been invented, that spreads information around like the stuff that took out Trent Lott. It’s funny what we learn when there’s no profit motive behind media, isn’t it?
Yup, the blogosphere is bringing millions of folks into much closer contact with facts, opinions, and the critical, or not so critical, analysis therof, than at any any single invention since the newspaper.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is a “blog”?
And how do you find them on the Web?
A blog is a web log. These are like magazines written by a single person, or, sometimes, by a few people. There are zillions of them.
One way to find them is to start at http://www.instapundit.com/ and follow the links to other blogs. The other blogs have further links which lead ever onward.
By that definition, is the SDMB a blog? It seems Teemings certainly would be.
I think most people consider a blog to be a web page consisting of regular postings by one or a few contributors. You typically visit a weblog because you like the analysis a particular blogger provides – kind of like reading the same columnist regularly in your local newspaper. The SDMB is more of an online community.
But it’s hardly like there are hard and fast definitions of these things – there’s no definite answer to your question.
There’s a list of top blogs here.
I do think the blogs have an increasing amount of influence. They may not reach a huge number of people compared to the , say, networks but those that they reach are more likely to be activists who contribute money or volunteer. These people are important for any campaign especially in the primaries.
An example of this is www.dailykos.com , a leading Democratic blogger, who helped start something called epatriots to help raise money for the DNC. Within a few days he had raised thousands of dollars on his site. Terry McAulife,DNC chief, was impressed enough to speak to him briefly which he describes here:
http://www.dailykos.com/archives/003179.html#003179
Dean’s campain is probably making the best use of the Web and the blogosphere; in fact the Dean campagin has its own blog:
http://www.blogforamerica.com/
Here is a great article in TNR about how Dean is using the web:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=MsFThRpEfeVRNVf9ei9j2R==