The Power of Positive Thinking

Boys and Girls, Ladies and Gentlemen, Children of All Ages:

2004: YEAR OF THE BLOG!

What is a blog? Why is a blog? What is this new, foul and excremential format systematically ridding conventional media sources of their power archetypes? Why the bitching? Why the kvetching?

Could it be about money? Could it be about power?

C'mon people -- why shore it is!

First: What is a BLOG?

Easy: it's short for weB LOG. What is a weblog (or BLOG)?

In truth? It's nothing more than a standard website which is updated somewhat frequently, like a diary -- and can be updated with its author's newest posts by the hour, the day or the week. A BLOG is generally a funny-looking website of great vertical length (on your computer's screen) with a whole bunch of reference material to other websites on either side.

BLOGs are customarily created around the individual author's proclivities towards politics and/or other seemingly-esoteric topics. At this point, "conservative" BLOGs essentially predominate, but primarily because "liberals" have been slow to acknowledge and utilize the alternative technological resources available -- to include the basic AM (or Amplitude Modulation) dial, along with the internet. The 2004 BLOG of the year was officially acknowledged as:
http://powerlineblog.com/

December 19, 2004
Blog of the Year
As noted below, Time Magazine has named us "Blog of the Year" in the issue which hits the newsstands tomorrow. (The Man of the Year, of course, is President Bush.) The article about us, by Lev Grossman, is very good. The photo that accompanies it, I'm not so sure about:
Grossman's article describes how we started the site, tells a bit about us personally, and relates the story of The Sixty-First Minute, the post on the forged CBS memos that the Trunk began on the morning of September 9. In the article, I describe the Sixty-First Minute as the most famous post in the (short) history of the blogosphere.

Some points about BLOGs this year:

Bloggers Get Scoops Too: After book editor Russ Kick read that the U.S. military was clamping down on press photos of coffins coming back from Iraq, he didn't just pen an angry rant on his blog, the Memory Hole. He filed a Freedom of Information Act request—and embarrassingly for the Pentagon, was mailed a CD from the Air Force with 361 coffin snaps, which he promptly posted. The national press, which hadn't thought to ask whether the military had pictures, beat a path to Kick's door.

Anyone Can Do It: Blogs wouldn't be such a democratic medium if they weren't so easy to set up. The most popular service, Blogger, owned by Google, boasts features like push-button photoblogging. Microsoft has launched a trial version of its own blogging service.
GO TO: blogger.com, spaces.msn.com

Back to reality: So setting up a blog is easy, huh? Try being 50 and attempting to set up your own BLOG. Any 13-year-old can routinely hack into the NSA and NRO websites. It takes me 30 minutes just to match my own damn socks in the morning.

However, power brokers take note: Standard media? Moribund. Print media? Moribund. Major ABC, CBS, NBC media? Moribund. Cable? Expanding. Internet? HUGELY expanding. AM radio? Still expanding. And these arenas, Boys and Girls, are the realms of what the New Republic would quantify as (insert shudder here), GULP, conservative thinking.

Really? D'ya think?

National radio host, blogger and author Hugh Hewitt (http://www.hughhewitt.com) in his newest book BLOG: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World (got my copy on order but not yet received, dammit!) indicates that a major informational power shift is underway, from big corporate, systematic, classically-liberal media indices to smaller, much less formal systems replete with minute-to-minute technology, the ability to communicate in a horrendously rapid fashion, and a connection to "the public" or "the people" impossible with traditional media structures. BLOGs will become an even greater competitive mass informational force in the coming year and, I predict, will push the techno envelope further with more professionally-produced websites, streaming video, gifs, jpegs, in-depth archives and more.

Incidentally -- look for major future changes on Bloviating Zeppelin as well!