http://mama.indstate.edu/users/bones/WhyIHateWebLogs.html

Ever since I first came across it, I’ve tried my best to live up to the standards laid out therein.

For example, in politics, blogs helped build a furor over a campaign incident in Virginia that helped a Democratic candidate barely edge a favored GOP candidate, and the balance of the Senate was tipped.

Campaigns at all levels use and read blogs, MUCH more than bloggers might assume.

That said, the onus is on us to keep the larger blogosphere as well as its smaller communities, like the NOLA bloggers, open for communication. This has philosophical and technical aspects. This means looking beyond the Big 10 or Big 50 blogs for perspectives and journalistic finds; otherwise it’s like reading the Top 10 papers or watching various TV stations. It’s true that the wisdom of a crowd is something to heed, but people as a tendency look for expert opinions all in the same place, when they are really strewn everywhere. Technically, this requires a search of the internet for those blogs and discussions and not simply clicking on the same blogs in your Favorites everyday.

Furthermore, the real discussions live in the Comments sections of posts which, in their current form, require elevation. It is often the case that the comments often supersede the original post in depth and latitude.

In my opinion, the blogosphere does continue to reflect social inequities in that not all communities have a voice, know of the power of blogs or care to communicate in this manner. Whatever the case, we lose a viewpoint that is critical to a democratic discussion. It is very critical to realize that blogs are not the be-all and end-all, just like newspapers and TV news, because democratization in this case is not a far-reaching thing.

In closing, blogs are collectively a great boon, but not a panacea – if you write consistently and moderately well, read other blogs and leave intelligent questions or comments on them and come to this tool (yes, it’s only a tool) with a mindset of wanting to learn more and participate, a dialogue will happen, which is the end requirement here. Before this medium, yelling at the TV and thinking you were the only one was the norm. However, now that we have this utility, it is our responsibility to keep, grow and share it with a conscience, which makes it like democracy, society, neighborhood, media or any such social construct we’ve come up with over the ages.