Blogging's Eternal Return

Brian Doherty | January 27, 2005

Tim is far too modest in his post below on Jack Shafer's latest takedown on blogosphere triumphalism. He neglects to mention that, unlike Reason pal Radley Balko at the Agitator who has been saying what Shafer said "for months," our man Cavanaugh said it all with brutal wit nearly three years ago--that is, as long as "OG blogger" Balko has been blogging at all. A bit from Tim's April 2, 2002, piece at the Online Journalism Review:

You can try to keep all the blog news straight in your head, to render a chronicle fit for posterity, but the fog of war blogging will get you. Where did I read that pithy comment about Arab paranoia 23 minutes ago? Was it by Virginia Postrel or Andrew Sullivan, or was it one of those other guys who's always saying how great Virginia Postrel and Andrew Sullivan are? Or no, wait, maybe it was the blog by the guy who thinks Mickey Kaus and Sullivan are geniuses and always links to their blogs, but thinks Postrel is an idiot - and always links to her blog to prove it?

Am I reading the article in praise of blogs or the one about how bloggers have got the mainstream media on the run? Hey, wait! Both of these articles remind me of that article I saw on somebody's blog about how the bloggers are revolutionizing the very way we think of news. Who did that one? Was it Glenn Reynolds? Nick Denton? Did Ken Layne give a shout-out to something Matt Welch had on his blog, and did Welch give a back-atcha link to Layne's blog? Or was it the other way around?

Which just goes to show, blogs' true glory may lie in being an endless space to say again and again what has been said again and again. (In fact, I'm sure some wag will gleefully point out where that has been said on some blog, years ago. And more power to you, wag.)

Comments

Matt Welch|1.27.05 @ 8:10PM|#

I've heard that some of the people mentioned in that article *cough* were particularly delighted months later when TC & Reason totally jumped on our bandwagon, man....

The Lonewacko Blog|1.27.05 @ 11:28PM|#

Girls + a webcam + this post + the dog food guy to do publicity = Ayn Rand'$ ca$h and lots of it. Just think about it, OK?

raymond|1.28.05 @ 12:19AM|#

Blogs (and especially comments) are just un(on-paper)publishable letters to editors.

Except for the spammers' pieces, of course.

|1.28.05 @ 1:29AM|#

I remember Ken Layne just going off after that article. It was awesome. And by awesome, I mean totally sweet.

|1.28.05 @ 3:54AM|#

It's disappointing that nobody notices that the greatest contribution is from comments, an art form that Hugh Hewitt is not the first not to notice. The very best comments remove ideas from the table.

|1.28.05 @ 11:07AM|#

Your navel gazing is so uninteresting.