[ILHam] FW: Hot air in the `blogosphere' - (c) 2003, Chicago Tribune

[Mike D.]

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Hot air in the `blogosphere'
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John Cook

June 15, 2003

It's safe to say that when a new technological trend has captured the
attention of my 62-year-old, Social Security-collecting father, its time has
come. So it's fitting that my father happened to call last week with urgent
advice that I, his politics-obsessed writer son, start a Weblog, or "blog"
as the kids (and retirees, apparently) these days are calling it.

These are heady days for blogs: Not only has my dad started reading them,
but Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger whose witty and humane posts leading up
to and during the war in Iraq earned him international celebrity, recently
was profiled in The New Yorker and landed a column--a real one--in the
British newspaper The Guardian.

And perhaps most important, the bloggers who incessantly needled The New
York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg scandals took
credit for the resignations 10 days ago of Executive Editor Howell Raines
and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd.

"The blogosphere"--that's the rather unfortunate term of art for the global
echo chamber that the bloggers have built for themselves--"in general
created a growing chorus of criticism that helped create public awareness of
exactly what Raines was up to," wrote Andrew Sullivan, the neoconservative
former New Republic editor who maintains one of the most popular blogs and
who has had it in for the Times for years.

"It pulled the curtain back on the man behind the curtain," he wrote. "We
did what journalists are supposed to do--and we did it to journalism
itself."

If it weren't for the blogs ruthlessly cataloging the internal dissent at
the Times, Sullivan suggested, Raines and Boyd would have hung on to their
jobs.

It takes a certain ego to relentlessly post your musings on virtually
everything that comes across your field of vision, as Sullivan does on his
Web site. So his wildly self-regarding assertion that he and a few other
talented obsessives with high-speed Internet connections and too much time
on their hands played a crucial role in the decision-making process of a
multinational publishing behemoth with $3.1 billion a year in revenue should
come as no surprise.

But if Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the Times' publisher, ever says, "I accepted
Raines' resignation because of what I read on the Internet," I will eat my
hat.

Still, blogs are having a moment. Sullivan reports that more than 400,000
visitors came to his in March, the last month for which statistics are
available on his site. And the influential chattering of bloggers such as
Mickey Kaus (www.kausfiles.com) and Glenn Reynolds (www.instapundit.com)
during the debate over whether to go to war with Iraq led to a spate of
newspaper articles about the power of the blogosphere--the Los Angeles Times
went so far as to compare the role of blogs in the second Iraq war to the
role played by CNN in the first.

Amid all the blog hoopla, we would do well to remember that there are nearly
700,000 ham radio operators in the U.S., and more than 2.5 million
worldwide, according to the American Radio Relay League, which calls itself
"the national association for radio enthusiasts." That's compared with
74,000 or so daily visits to Reynolds' site last week.

I bring up ham radio because it's essentially a low-tech version of
blogging--it's a far-flung network of isolated, lonely and bored people,
probably in their basements, probably in their underwear, who share obscure
interests and communicate with one another via a technology they are
obsessed with.

And you tend to read remarkably little about the influence of all those ham
radio freaks these days. (In the spirit of full disclosure I should point
out that I am a bored, lonely and isolated person who, often in my
underwear, obsessively reads the blogs referenced here, and others. I'm just
under no illusions as to their opinion-shifting power.)

Which brings me to blogging's little secret: There's no there there. The
vast majority of popular bloggers do little more than link to other blogs.
"RUMSFELD VS. THE ARMY BRASS: Phil Carter has the latest developments,"
reads a typical post, in its entirety, on Reynolds' site. Follow the link to
Carter's blog and you'll find . . . links to Fox News and Associated Press
stories, accompanied by a few pithy remarks.

This is not a new opinion-generating force in politics and journalism. It's
a glorified clipping service.

And as such, many blogs are quite useful; the best is Plastic.com, which is
a sort of metablog wherein a small community of readers can submit
interesting stories. But it may explain why the average visitor to Reynolds'
site, according to his statistics, stayed for 13 seconds.

Surely it takes longer than that to bring down the editor of The New York
Times.

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Send e-mail for John Cook to jjcook@tribune.com.


Copyright (c) 2003, Chicago Tribune

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