If you read my first post, you'll see that one of my stated purposes for starting this blog was to see what this blogging phenomenon is all about.
I intend to write a much longer post about what I've learned, but I want to point out a story which demonstrates the blogosphere's strangely large influence considering it's lack of readership.
CNN fired it's chief news executive Eason Jordan (at least I assume that "resigned" means he was fired), apparently because bloggers have been complaining about a statement he made at a public forum.
Law professor Eugene Volokh writes:
This looks like a classic example of the power of blogging: Though many of Jordan's critics have been politicians and journalists, as best I can tell the mainstream media initially paid little attention to the story. In an earlier era, it may have died from lack of attention, if it weren't for the bloggers' talking about the story, and making it hard for people to ignore.
Volokh's post is extremely self-congratulatory, but he's probably correct that were it not for blogs, Jordan wouldn't have resigned. So blogs do have a surprising amount of influence given their small readership.
It's easy to say that the blogging phenomenon is extremely overrated, yet it does have the power, in some cases, to keep alive a story that otherwise would have died.
Looking forward to your deeper insights about this!
It may be that blogs are the new version of published opinion pieces (building upon newspaper pieces and Thomas Paine's Common Sense). Not many people write to their elected representatives or their local paper's editors (and fewer still get published) so when an effort is made by anyone that opinion becomes overweighted. Blogs are a convenient and effective outlet for 'ordinary' people who care enough to express their opinions. Most people don't make the effort to develop and articulate their positions - the blogosphere is like a magnet for those who do with a low barrier to entry.
Posted by: Stuart Berman | February 12, 2005 at 05:17 PM