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December 30, 2005BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Year-End Thoughts On Blogging
The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank based in New York, looks at blogging milestones in the policy arena for 2005.
The list is available at DMI Blog, but the introduction to the list is worth repeating in full here:
Read by ordinary people, journalists, politicians and their staff, blogs are shaping the public dialogue around breaking news and providing a forum for people to air opinions on the issues they care about. Blogs can be a megaphone enabling regular people -- citizen journalists -- to sound off among the "experts." But blogs can also transform the one-way message machine by enabling grassroots activists to leverage their collective power to pressure the traditional media to cover developments relevant to the public interest.
UPDATE (via Instapundit, including a new headline): Michael Silence, a blogger at the Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee, shared his year-end thoughts on blogging. While he concluded that blogging is "here to stay," he also said the number and readership of blogs is leveling, and niches are developing.
All of those points seem to be on the mark. But Silence had another observation that I question: "I think the fad of politicians blogging has come and gone. It's time-consuming, a lot of work, and there's no way they can respond to all the comments."
Maybe that is true in Tennessee -- he's in a better position to say than me -- but based on what I've seen in Congress in the past year, I wholeheartedly disagree. Lawmakers are just starting to realize how they can use blogs to energize their political bases and bypass the media to take their messages straight to the public. As more lawmakers succeed at those goals, more lawmakers will blog. And even the ones who do not blog will start trying to woo bloggers.
Posted by | 05:52 PM
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