Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Wednesday, December 20, 2006 2:53:12 PM
George Will has a new article out that disparages the work of people who want to be serious blog commentators on local and world events. He is most distressed with the importance Time magazine put on blogs in its "Person of the Year" article. I would love to link it, but I can't yet find it on the internet. (edited. Found it!)
He claims that 99.9 percent of the 100 million blogs are not serious, and implies that serious people should ignore the remainder as well. I did the math. One tenth of one percent of 100 million blogs is still 100,000 serious blogs. That is a pretty impressive number of serious blogs to dismiss.
Quoting:
Time's bow to amateurs who are, it strangely suggests, no longer obscure, and in the same game that Time is in, is refuted by a glance--which is all an adult will want--at YouTubes most popular videos.
George Will would do well to begin examining the influence of the internet on the elections, and the techniques Democratic bloggers used to damage Republican candidates like Virginia Senator George Allen. As I recall, YouTube was very effective in that election.
Google bombers also tried, with unknown success, to influence the election by turning off voters who used google to search for prominent Republicans like George Bush and Rick Santorum.
Here in Colorado, we had a supposedly Republican blog doing opposition research against Bob Beauprez. Also, Media Matters appears to have been quite successful in forcing newspaper coverage to the left over the last two years. No one would call the Rocky Mountain News a conservative paper anymore.
Perhaps George Will might want to enquire of Dan Rather as to whether the blogosphere is unimportant and should be dismissed. Of course, Rather is in denial and still claims that his National Guard story about George Bush had merit. Powerline was "made" during that period, and its authors have begun to be regulars on cable news programs.
This blog is a serious blog with a serious purpose. The author may not be a Thomas Paine, but by hammering relentlessly on the issue of legal ethics reform, there is little doubt that there will be reform.
George Will is a luddite who would try to destroy the effectiveness of blogs by disparaging them. Even so, he writes in the style of a "serious" blogger. The difference is only in the media he appears in.
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This blog came into being when the author got involved in a lawsuit and discovered that he could do nothing to stop attorney misconduct. See "Thumbnail Info on This Blog