Hugh Hewitt has some great comments about bloggers at his site:
As for the CBS meltdown, John Fund has a nice essay on the big blinders CBS is wearing, and kindly credits me as the unofficial historian of the blogosphere, a job no one could really do. It would be like being the historian of the Borg. The cumulative impact of the blogs on CBS/Rather credibility has reduced that fabled news organization to the status of whiner, and it cannot hope to combat the combination of its own shoddy reporting and the multiplying power of citizen journalism --open source journalism.
One example: Not long ago a young man in San Diego began a blog --Stones Cry Out, a nicely designed, solidly reported, center-right Evangelical blog. Here is author Rick Brady's Saturday post on CBS. Now, obviously, Brady isn't going to have the traffic of Powerline, INDC Journal, Instapundit etc, but he will have unique traffic --people going just to his site, because they know him, or found and like his blog, or were referred there by the Fraters gang (which is how I found him), and thus the CBS story spreads beyond its already established audience.
Technorati founder David Sifry explained the importance of this to me at the Democratic Convention in Boston, calling it the "power of the tail." Sure, a few hundred blogs seem to own a large share of the traffic, as N.Z.Bear's rankings by traffic shows. But there are tens of thousands of blogs each racking up unique visitors. If those blogs in the tail pick up a meme --say, "Dan Rather is a doddering fool and CBS is covering up for him"-- its spread across the universe of people using the web for information gathering is huge and almost instantaneous. And irreversible because a friend or colleague of Rick is much more likely to believe his analysis because he knows and trusts Rick than it is some knucklehead from CBS who is attempting to dismiss Rick as a pajama-wearing loon.
And I’m not even wearing my pjs.
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