Billmon says a few words about blogs and Howard Dean too.
Billmon writes:
Just because the web is decentralized doesn't mean it's fractured. Thanks to the miracle of Google (not to mention the even more powerful search tools coming on line) any piece of information or artistic content that exists anywhere on the web is also accessible everywhere on the web. This is why experiences (Dean's yeaaahhh!!!) can shared so widely. And the sharing is two-way. I can sit here in Davos and make fun of the scream, and others can flame me for helping destroy the greatest presidential candidate in American history.
and he writes:
This creates a classic free-rider problem. If the blogs eventually steal the mass media's audience (or at least, key parts of it) and the Internet as a whole continues to steal its revenues, there will come a time when those big, expensive news-gathering operations will become economically insupportable.
It's not hard to see Billmon point on most of his issues.
Folks are discovering blogs more and more and more.
Blogs offer a profound level of creativity and they offer something else too. A way around the control of the kind that runs Clear Channel Radio and of course, our major news networks. Political pundits are running news commentary and are picked because they reflect their corporate controlled ideology instead of using any real form of what I would call "news journalism".
Corporations have hijacked the TV media's government news commentary particularly as it pertains to our government officials, and so the news media is now injecting biased opinion devoid of any real facts.
Americans don't pick their presidents any more. The corporate controlled media does this. Howard Dean and Al Gore are prime examples of this fact.
So when blogs get enough attention to start influencing decisions on a national level, that's when the corporations will want to kneecap folks like Daily Kos, Billmon and Atrios.
BTW please check out Eschaton's (Artios) lastest horror on how Dean is being attacked.