The growing power of the blog: Hugh Hewitt explains future of major new Web trend

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Wednesday, August 1, 2002 | Hugh Hewitt

[Ken H]

Maybe FR could allow pay pal click-throughs for posters.

Sign me up. My opinions are negotiable and I'll FReep for a very reasonable hourly rate.

In fact, what would stop it now?

Not me!

[Congressman Billybob]

This is an excellent article. And the marriage of talk radio with blogging is already past its First (Paper) Anniversary. I know. I was part of the ceremony. I was blogging before bloggers invented the word, six years come Sunday. And I've been doing talk radio for five years, come December.

It's a heady, but very interestng mixed world out there. And the bosses in the lamestream media have zero control over that process; it's a win-win proposition.

Congressman Billybob

Click for latest column: "Good People, Naked People, People Who Are Wet and Wild."

Click for latest book: "to Restore Trust in America"

[eureka!]

Hugh Hewitt bump...

[Centurion2000]

a blog is an online journal where you write your toughts on every issues.

Pretty much like here then :)

[ken5050]

I think you hit the nail on the head....I rarely go to a blog...unless someone here posts a link....and usually it's a lot of chaff to get to a small kernel of wheat....

[SamAdams76]

A dumb question, what is blog and how does it differ from FR?

In a way, FR and blogging are very similar. We come here to discuss our positions on the issues and sometimes to just ramble on. Only real difference I see is that a web blog is passive. You post what you have to say and that's that. Here on FR, your postings can be challenged and discussed and as well, you can challenge and discuss the postings of others. This makes this format more superior in my opinion.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

In fact, what would stop it now?

Lawyers, I think . . .

[CJ Wolf]

web+log = ..b+log = Blog

It's a log. Really it's just a catch phrase from web commentary. Thus, I've been blogging in the sense of the word since 96.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

This makes this format more superior in my opinion.

Much more superior.

[bvw]

If individual posters posted pay-pal links, would that make FR a for profit?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

If you join in and have the goods, you are opting out of elected life and any prayer of eventual judicial or other high-level governmental selection because candor is the first requirement of successful blogging … and there is no erasing your past work.

Puts me in mind of Rush Limbaugh's description of his show as "the long form." He is a known quantity to anyone who cares to know what he thinks; you cannot hide your own predelictions from the audience and still be interested enough to be interesting for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Genuine argument is emerging from the stranglehold that the bigs of . . . [TV, radio, and the high-speed press] have imposed upon it. "Cut and thrust" is back, and a web duel makes light sabers look tame. As a center-right conservative confident of the ideas on my side, this means very good things indeed.

But in the political spectrum as the old-media libs define it,

if you feel the need to attach "center" to your self- described position you are not a confident conservative.

[handk]

a blog is an online journal where you write your toughts on every issues.

What is a "tought"? What are "every issues"?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I'm not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV.

But I suspect that FR's legal battles would be tougher if someone were making a buck off its postings.

[bvw]

FR itself asks for donations, regularly. And that's fine. Could individual posters also ask for donations? Could they do so if they established 501c3's for themselves?

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

the greybeards in the world of web-player-wannabes are going to figure out that the blogocracy matters a great deal in generating traffic to their sites, and the scramble to link to the big blogs will be on. I hope Glenn Reynolds, the force behind InstaPundit.com, turns aside offers from all but either the Washington Post or the New York Times. If a center-right blog marries a center-left paper, the offspring would be good for American politics and journalism.

The only interest of a "center left" paper is as a challenge to the gray cells to compose the shapest rebuttal. FR is an open "letters to the editor" space not censored by the editor who published the original piece.

[RonDog]

I read Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan when they were both just ink-stained wretches, and I interviewed Eugene Volokh when he was wearing academic short-pants.
Now that they have been absorbed into the Borg, er, Blog, they are just more available, not particularly different.
But their collective power is growing. Growing rapidly, in fact..." - Hugh Hewitt

So, resistance is blogging futile?

From http://stadt.heim.at/hongkong/150072/voyager.html:

SevenofNine, FR's favorite Borg

.

If you listen to Hugh Hewitt, or read his WND commentaries,
this PING list is for YOU!

Please post your comments, and BUMP!

(If you want OFF - or ON - my "Hugh Hewitt PING list" - please let me know)

[RonDog]

ping

[RonDog]

The most revolutionary effect of blogging is still a ways off. The first three generations of media are remarkably age-, race- and gender-driven. What had originally been a reserve of white males is now a region of tortuous balancing and hypersensitive massaging of unspoken quotas. The blogosphere has none of that. It is the real marketplace of ideas, where there is no barrier to entry and Ragged Dick doesn't have to sell papers for very long if he's got talent...

That reference would, of course, be from the Horatio Alger "rags to riches" stories, i.e.:
Alger, who died in 1899, wrote more than 100 works of fiction
expressing his Strive and Succeed philosophy.
Estimates are that his books sold in excess of 200 million copies
during the latter half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century.

[colorado tanker]

Thanks for the ping, RonDog, but most of all thanks for the pik of seven of nine!