The New Republic is reporting that blogs are responsible for Daschle’s downfall. They targeted the local newspaper that had been sympathetic to Daschle and Democrats in general.
I do not see why the success of blogs in taking down Daschle, Rather and Jordan has to be part of a synester GOP plot. Given the huge success of peer-to-peer networks on the internet, I fail to see why no one has made the connection between them and the news. Peer-to-peer networks empower data that people want to be distributed easily. Blogs empower ideas that people agree with to be circulated quickly.
In all of these stories there was one group of people with information who refused to give it to those who want it. CBS knew that the documents were forged and the person who gave it to them was a liberal cook, but CBS was (and still is) unwilling to admit it. The Argus Leader was unwilling to voice conservative opinions to an increasingly conservative audience. If the Argus Leader was voicing the ideas Gannon was, no one would have cared about Gannon’s website. The 60s are 40 years over. Until the media is willing to adapt to the changes in cultural attitudes, blogs will be a powerful force in our culture–giving voice to otherwise suppressed ideas.
This is not a plot by the GOP. The success of conservative blogs is the result of a group of like-minded people who feel misrepresented in other media streams. One author has a grudge against the local newspaper so he starts writing his rants on some blog. That would normally be the end of it (like my blog for instance), but sometimes, the author hits on something that an entire community agrees with and is not hearing from other news streams. The community then escalates the idea, sending it to friends and generating a steady stream of hits. At some point some more influential group like GOPUSA notices the potential of the idea and starts using its influence to further promote the ideas.
Like peer-to-peer networks there is a wealth of providers of information. If the normal channels of distribution are functioning properly, little information is transferred. However, if something repressed elsewhere is brought onto the peer-to-peer network (like a beta of an OS) or a blog (like fabricated documents), then the network or blog will light up with people accessing the information. This is when the real magic happens.
Unlike a normal server, where hot data will reduce the speed with which you can access the information, hot data is the easiest to access on peer-to-peer networks. This is because as more people get the information, more servers are created distributing the information. This ramping-up of distributive capacity is what makes peer-to-peer networks so powerful (but bad at archiving data). Blogs have the same capacity. After someone posts hot information, other people grab it, posting it on their blogs and emailing it to their friends. You have this amazing, cascading, waterfall effect. The best way to stop it, of course, is to either a.) just provide the information yourself (what news organizations should do) or b.) control the information so tightly you are the only entity aware of it (what software companies should and politicians generally do).
Scientists have found two Octopi that