Numero Uno on
Blogdex this morning is an Op/Ed piece by Maureen Dowd. I imagine that bloggers are linking it mainly for the following opinion:
The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment.
There are so many things wrong with this sentence, it is difficult to choose where to begin. Let's start with her opinion of the Internet as a "cool American Frontier". I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't use the internet because it's "cool" or to be like my peers. I use it, because it is useful. In the old days, perhaps people put electricity or telephones in their homes originally to "be cool" (or "hep" or whatever the term was back then). However, the electricity and the telephone didn't fade away when their "coolness" faded because they were genuinely useful, something we didn't want to live without. The internet is the same way. If you are using it to be cool, or just because it's "in" then you just don't get it.
Now let's address her other point. That blogging is being ruined by the fact that "the establishment" is using blogs to push their message. Horse hockey. I have always seen one of the most significant things about the 'net being its ability to put "the power of the press" in the hands of the individual. Sure, to have any visibility to your message you had to get somebody to actually LINK to you, but the point is that your message was potentially one click away (the same as any corporate or "establishment" web page). You were on equal footing and it would be the content of your ideas, or opinions, or whatever that would be judged upon their merit. This is true of any individual's web site or blog. It really doesn't matter how many "establishment" blogs are out there. My blog (or my site) is still
my place for freedom of expression.
Some people (even bloggers) really don't get blogging yet. And by saying that, I don't mean that there is any one right way to use a blog. I mean if you want to use it for vapid Quizilla quizzes (I won't link to them because I
hate them), fine. If you want to use it as a daily diary to tell everyone what you had for breakfast or whine about the minor tragedies in life, fine. I'm sure there are some theraputic benefits there for you, but don't expect many other people to care to read you.
I think that one of the most important things that bloggers can do is to make sure that issues important to them are not overlooked. If an obscure news site reports on something that would otherwise be ignored, or swept under the carpet by big media, bloggers can do something about it. By pointing at it with links from their blogs, bloggers are saying "Hey! Look at this! This is important!". That's why I look at Blogdex. I'm interested in seeing which stories people are linking to, and it is interesting to see how some rise, or go on for days. It sends up a red flag that the public is concerned about this story, for whatever reason. I have to believe that exerts some political pressure, and focuses more media attention on it. (If people are interested in reading about it, then we had better do a story about it).
Personally, I like to use blogs to save links for things that I am interested in coming back to later. The biggest danger of this lies in the internet itself, where content can change. Example: There was a story on an evangelist's web site saying that he had been contacted by the White House for a report on the Apocalypse of Revelation, and that it had been delivered and that "George Bush now knows his place in the Bible prophecy" (or words to that effect). I read it myself. A day later, that page was different. I'm sure the White House had something to do with that. But I wish I had saved the page, instead of just the link to where it
was.
<aside> This is easy to do. From your browser menu choose View > Source. Then save it as an ".html" document. With your text editor add the following tag to the HEAD of the document (anywhere between the <head> and </head> tags):
<base href="blah"> Replace "blah" with the URL of the originating page. That will make sure that the graphics and navigation links on the page still work, if they were relatively addressed. Otherwise you will see the text (better than nothing) but the images will appear to be missing when you view it locally.
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