2/16/2005 10:42:00 PM|||Dave|||Just watched the recent Charlie Rose segment about blogs. Charlie is one of the best interviewers in the biz, but he showed his age on this one. As the segment went along, it became quickly apparent that Rose is not a web surfer nor does he visit blogs. He was struggling just to comprehend the basics of what goes on in the blogosphere.

In any event, his panel consisted of Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Joe Trippi, and Wonkette.

Sullivan shined, getting to the heart of the matter with salient point after salient point. Sullivan cited Hayek's theory of collective knowledge as the underlying dynamic of the blogosphere and that got me pumped. Increasingly, however, I share Sullivan's perspective of the dark side of the blogosphere which will only get worse before it gets better. There's a blogospheric explosion taking place, with (if one panelist was relaying accurate information) a new blog created every 3 seconds. The informational overload out there now can be overwhelming.

Critical mass was reached a couple of years ago, but the full mainstreaming of blogs (i.e., where everybody, and I mean everybody, either has a blog, knows someone who has a blog, or has a firm grasp of what a blog is) will take a few years more. I expect political blogs, and their influence, to plateau sometime before, during, or immediately after the 2008 Presidential elections. (Not much of a prediction, I know). But then I foresee a prolonged period of public 'boredom' with the sheer quantity and endless niche modality of the political blogosphere. Lifestyle blogs will continue to proliferate and will be as ubiquitous as cell phones, but I believe the influence of political blogs per se will have a lull, how long I cannot guess. Perhaps an analogy can be found in the dot.com '90s, where a rush into the marketplace led to wildly inflated, unsustainable stock prices. The bubble eventually crashed and we're all now a little bit more cautious, a little bit more prudent. As with all else, whatever transpires will be a function of the marketplace adjusting for information overload and intensified partisanship. In the end, new concepts of filters/aggregators will emerge to provide new natural orders and all will be well.

Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, without question the leading 'clearinghouse' (to use Andrew's apt description) for measuring conservativism's zeitgeist on a daily (or in Glenn's case, hourly) basis, was surprisingly quiet and non-geeky. For some reason I was imagining a guy who posts in super-human quantities while maintaining his day job of Law Professor would be geeky. He's not. Glenn had two gems: One was his suggestion for MSM establishments to hire a guy whose job is to run their released-to-the-public stories against blog indexing search engines (e.g., Technorati), and look for unusually high concentrations of 'hits' to a particular blog's citation of the respective MSM story. This would, of course, be a pretty good blog for the MSM flunky to check out, as it may point to a serious problem with the MSM news story itself. Retractions, supplemental reporting, and the like would then be more instantaneous and responsive to the dynamics of the New Media. Has Glenn copyrighted this idea yet? His other gem was in pointing out that we shouldn't judge a blog's relevance based on its total hit-count. "There's a lot of niche blogs out there who don't have huge hit numbers, " Glenn said (and I'm paraphrasing), "but who do an excellent job in their subject area".

Joe Trippi was thoroughly impressive. As the man behind Dean's historic internet campaign while running for President, Trippi was not being Deaniacal but was being thoughtful and dare I say visionary. (I've never really seen Trippi act anything other than respectful and professional throughout his many TV appearances). His gem was in teasing out the plausible scenario in which a blogospheric architecture of grass roots citizens, through a criticial mass momentum, actually transforms a national election. I agree with Jim Geraghty on this one: Trippi's a guy to watch.

Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) was an embarassment. She spoke, acted, and behaved exactly as I'd imagine she would, like a character straight out of "Sex in the City". I never understood the appeal of Wonkette; it's a slickly produced site with lots of cool graphic thingees but substance-wise she's as vapid as Tina Brown discussing Iraq policy or Anna Nicole Smith trying to grasp quantum physics. I could see if Rose was doing a segment on culture blogs or gossip blogs, but he wasn't. Whether he planned it that way or not, he was doing a segment on political blogs. If Rose wanted a token female blogger, he could have gone with Malkin or sought some smart female blogger on the left. Wonkette was way out of her element alongside Sullivan, Trippi, and Reynolds.|||110861177672040793|||Coming Up Roses