Blogs

Cody Willard at The Street.com has a nice piece of article on the blogs. It has nothing to do with the market, but blogs itself. I found it interesting reading.

"The blog phenomenon is really starting to kick in, and while it's certainly being overhyped near term, blogging is indeed going to be a key component in the Internet revolution that continues apace.
With the latest mainstream media debacles coming from heretofore highly respected places like CBS News and Newsweek, people are wondering if blogs will supplant mainstream media. News content and distribution, like most things, is not a zero-sum game though.
As we all become ever more connected and able to communicate via the phone networks, email, instant messaging and especially blogging, we become ever more empowered.
Public opinion no longer is filtered (and skewed) by the media and the partisan political leaders. Whereas the printing press allowed the written word of the few to be read by the many, blogging enables the written word of the many to be read by the many.
The distribution mechanisms for information for the last few hundred years have enabled a wondrous growth of literacy and communication. But as the saying goes, the freedom of the press has always belonged to those who own one. Well, guess what, in the 21st century, ink is free. For the first time in the history of the world, freedom of the press is a reality.
Control has fully shifted from the few to the many, and each of us now has more control than anyone's ever had before. Our forefathers knew that a system of checks and balances would help curb corruption. They put in a system in which three disparate branches of government keep an eye on each other, and the framers knew that it was important enough to keep the government and the press apart that they made freedom of the press the First Amendment to the Constitution in the Bill of Rights.
As brilliant as he was, I'm not sure Thomas Jefferson ever would have imagined what a system of a billion checks and balances would look like -- or the prosperity that such a system would spark. The one thing that evil always hates is attention. We always fight evil by calling attention to it -- we're taught to scream if we're attacked, we install loud alarms to protect our cars and homes, we put up lights and security cameras to safeguard citizens.
It took two zealous reporters to take down Nixon -- and what action did they actually take to bring down the most powerful man in the world? They broke the story. They simply told the public the facts. The Washington Post and the rest of the media at the time picked up and focused attention on the malfeasance."