Posted on 10/23/2005 12:18:04 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
T here's been a lot of excitement about blogs since they broke into public consciousness during the 2004 election. They are now growing at an astronomical rate. The blog search engine Technorati now tracks almost 20 million of them, and various estimates of the number of blog users range from 32 million to 50 million Americans.
Blogophiles see blogs as a new way for citizens to express themselves and, especially among the political bloggers, a new way for citizens to talk back to the "MSM" -- the mainstream media. According to Mike Godwin, legal director of a First Amendment advocacy group called Public Knowledge, "A.J. Liebling famously commented that freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Well, we all own one now."
But in all the excitement and hype, it's easy to overlook the fact that in some ways political blogs are not so different from or even separate from the MSM they often love to hate.
One similarity is found in emerging patterns of Web traffic. Blog abundance creates a paradox: Given more information choices than ever, most people economize, trying to find efficient ways to tame the information tide. So most regular users rely on a few blogs for most of their information. That's one reason why a handful of political blogs gets the lion's share of traffic. A recent study of 2 million Internet users found that the top four blog "hosts," such as blogspot.com, are visited by more than 5 million visitors per quarter. Unique visitors to the Drudge Report and the conservative blog freerepublic.com number2 million to 3 million per quarter, twice as many as their nearest competitors and dwarfing countless smaller blogs.
(Excerpt) Read more at oregonlive.com ...
Not so different? We have hundreds and sometimes thousands of minds on each story, and every point is debatable. But MSM news has one or two reporters, and it's a one-way conduit, from them to us. They are as different as night and day, and the author of the article, an MSM reporter, is whistling past his own graveyard.
I mean, talk about demeaning minorities...!
Naked?
Of course blogs are biased. Unlike the MSM, they don't claim to be impartial. That's the difference: blogs offer informed choice, the MSM doesn't.
No they looked under "Valerie Flame". ;-)
I've always heard..that most people who drink it regularly can stop anytime they want.
Like all the good and hard work our uniformed defenders are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? Yeah, the MSM is certainly ignoring, suppressing and skewering those stories.
LOL
Oh please,,even Cindy Shi'ite wouldn't be that bold. :-)
I'm sure you noticed the one quote this woman used in her article from the Professor at U Cal Berkeley. The very statistics in this article demonstrate that this professor of the "economics of communication" is dumb as a bag of hammers. Internet surfers are already making, on a daily basis, the kind of searches that will lead them to sources on whatever subjects they seek.
Based on those searches, some sites prosper and others wither on the vine. Do you suppose that the professor is unaware of Google? After all, Google is only seven years old, and academics tend to be behind the curve. LOL.
Congressman Billybob
Latest column: "Reporting on the 2,000th American Death in Iraq"
It's more sour grapes. The kids who used to run the only game in town can't quite get used to the idea that they ain't it anymore. LOL. Too bad.
And dead silence about what's her name, Miers.
That's what they said about McCain Feingold; remember how Bush said it was so clearly unconstitutional it didn't matter if he signed it or not. NOT.
*snort*
They don't know how to count.
On the 10/21 alone we had no less then 20 stories on la Flame affair.
It's ludicrous. It is even one of the featured topics at the top of the main page.
I think if we've had barely a peep on Valerie Flame, then we should all get ear plugs in case we have a real 'peep."
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