Blogswarming

Michelle Malkin: AIR ENRON: MORNING UPDATE: "Another interesting article appears in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer, where reporter Beth Gillin writes about bloggers' role in pushing the Air America story into the MSM. "

The article that Malkin refers to was a reasonably well-researched and written piece on the peculiar relationship between blogs and the mainstream media. Bloggers lack the name recognition to capture the huge audiences on their own, but they are able to effectively swarm in impromptu networks to attack fallacies in mainstream media/politics to force the media to address stories that they feel need addressed. The scandals with Dan Rather/CBS, Trent Lott, and this Air America piece that spurred the report have all been the result of incenced bloggers. Frankly I find it quite the beautiful, powerful thing, as informed citizens take the power in to their own hand: vigilante information leading to justice and true discourse. It's almost as if bloggers act as the self correcting mechanism for the media..... I believe the article actually compared the blogosphere to the court of appeals. Interesting stuff. We are in a new era of information dissemination, and the informed individual has more power than ever before. It's not a coincidence that News Corp is positioning itself to own MySpace.com and other personal and blog parent sites.

Read Malkin's post--she links to the Inquirer article as well (free registration), but you can also find it on the front of Section D in today's paper.