Have been greatly exaggerated.
My buddy Jeff, fresh into the DC blog scene, went off on a rant a couple of weeks ago.
Blogs used to be beautiful. Not all of them, of course; not even on average. But the specular highlights outshone the grey pall that covered the rest of it. Now writers of real thought and talent are morphing into partisan hacks — no offense meant to anybody — because they’ve been subsumed by the machine. They’ve been subsumed by the status quo.
While there’s some truth to what he’s saying about political blogs, it’s more an indictment of politics than of blogs, themselves. While it may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, there is beauty in the way the RBF, for instance, has given normal folks a means to focus on fitness.
This is going to have knock-on effects more profound than a new space for talking heads to listen to themselves.
And it’s not just the RBF. Blogs are letting companies connect with customers, letting musicians collaborate despite the tyrrany of distance. Blogs are beautiful.
Politics is ugly.