Our friends at Those Bastards point to an article in The Guardian stating that, essentially, bloggers are full of crap:
Bloggers and internet pundits are exerting a “disproportionately large influence” on society, according to a report by a technology research company. Its study suggests that although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.
I guess we could look at this in two different ways.
In the context of the world at large, any pundit with a large enough audience can exert a disproportionately large influence on their target audience. Radio show megamouths like Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, Sean Hannity, or any number of others are essentially professionally pissed off people with a large audience. With enough motivation and repetition, any one of these guys can stir up a hornet’s nest out of nothing.
Blogs really aren’t any different.
I think back to an incident a few weeks ago where someone had stolen the design of one of the more popular blogs in the “Professional Blogging” circle. A couple of nasty posts later by some major blogs – the story caught fire – and within a few hours the stolen design was gone and replaced with a boring old template.
But to a point made by Those Bastards, any person who looks at the blogosphere and thinks that places like Daily Kos truly represent the United States or the blogosphere as a whole is dumber than they look.
