I'm not a blogger, so my POV is that blogging is just the form of information exchange that netizens have grown to favor.
The internet was design to provide robust communicaton that would survive a nuclear exchange. It grew fron a command and control function to a nethod of exchanging data between scientists. The Scientists descovered that it was fun and decided to let their students share. The stundennts thought it was so much fun that they wanted EVERYBODY to be able to exchange ideas, opinions, recipies, dirty jokes, Paris Hilton pictures, whatever.
That is where we are today. A place for the public exchange (sharing) on anything and everything that can be digitized. Being the old fart that I am, I am more comfortable with a forun type venue then blogging. I consider blogging the 'sound bite' (byte?) of the internet. A series of snap shots as compared to the motion picture of a forum.
I might be the sound bite aspect of blogging that threatens the MSM ( which BTW, isn't so Main anymore), After all, it was the nightly news entertainment business that invented the sound bite, which is designed to titulate and not inform.
As far as the MSM goes, they are already fighting back. Blogging is under attack at the highest levels ( the UN, Eu, China and a multinational front group known as the Gang of 77). The plan is for these interests to wrest control of the Internet so they can tax it and decide who gets on and who doesn't. While I see fatal flaws in that plan, the MSM isn't saying a thing about it. The last thing they want is for citizens to get alarmed and instruct the politicians to fight this new regime. I wonder why the silence on the part of the MSM? I think that if it was the MSM that was being reorginized by the UN, et. al., there would be an enormous outcry by them. They would be manning the trenches in strength.
The MSM isn't fighting because they are too stoooopid to realize that if the Internet gets controlled by the UN, et.al.,( aka the Dark Forces) they will be next. Or maybe they do and it doesn't nmatter to them.
The important point is that if the bloggers cannot get organized enough to use the internet to protect themselves, they don't deserve to survive.

"It is us today, it will be you tommorrow."
-Haile Selassie; Emperor of Ethiopia
Addressing the League of Nations after their refusal to protect Ethiopia from Fascist Italy

Stehpinkeln,

Your take on the "forum" idea, vs. blogs as the "sound bites" of the internet is interesting. Sometimes I feel like I'm just skimming the surface of a subject, even though I've written three or five pages about it -- probably equal in length to a policy memo on the Hill. I think most readers, of this blog anyway, prefer something that has some depth to it, but isn't a dissertation. Personally, I like both.

But what do you mean by "forum"? Can you give an example?

http://www.bearpit.net/

I go there a lot nowdays. It is basicly a 'liberal' site in that the host is a Tai homosexual and proud of it, which means his brains to balls ratio is Marine Corps grade, given that homosexuals are executed in Tailand, or at least they where while I lived there.
But it does make it a good place to have discourse with both Left and Right.
Basiclly the difference is in the format. With Bloggers the orginization is by DATE, so the threads are today, yesterday and the day before. Forums are orginized by topic, so the threads run as long temporally as the debaters want them to. Because Time is a non-issue, the tendency is for posters to do more research. There are more URL's supporting the arguements.
I, of course, abuse that. I love to face a liberal with a quote from a famous Liberal that is contrary to the first Liberal's position. Then stand back and watch while Liberal A argues with an icon and/or hero of the left. When they start agruing with themself, it's the first step to enlightenment.

I got carried away;
I have URL's for specialized forums, such a "Regime change Iran" (Stay away, heavily censored and has a Trojan included, freee of charge), Sizuki motorcycle riders and obscure games(SP, Moo, Civ). Forums allow a deeper arguement then blogs, since the caravan doen't move on every day. It is possible to have an in depth discussion on a blog, but it isn't really the right tool for that. After all, you can drive a screw with a hammer, it just doesn't give that good a result.
The greatest forum ever IMHO was the "ON War" ForuM which was ran out of USC by a commie called Ralph. This was from the late 70's till whenever (on DarpNet, whic was the forerunner of the WWW). Ralph got depressed when the wall fell and started banning conservatives, which killed the forum. A conservative was defined as anyone who disagreed with Ralph. I made many e-pals there bunchs of whom I still correspond with. Some have become important and/or famous. Lots of euros posted there. It's fun to sit on the sidelines and watch a former Supreme Court nominee agrue with a future World Court judge over the legal effects of the "Christine affair"
That was when the English seized an American ship full of American weapons headed for Canada to support an American backed terrorist group attempting to overthrow the Canadian government and add Canada to the United States. Early third of the 19th century, IIRC. In it the USA and England agreed that seizing the Ship was not an act of War, because it preempted another war between the USA and England. It is the legal precedant for pre-emptive military action between nations. It was one of the first 'modern' legal (IE NOT a treaty) agreements on war between two states. Or something like that. The Debate got way to technical for me. I did learn more then I wanted to know trying to keep up.

I should have sent an E-Mail shouldn't I? Well Maintance of the objective is the first military principal in FMFM-1, so here goes;

Strategypage.com has an OK forum. It isn't as free flowing as most forums and if you read any of Dunnigan's books(How to make War" being his #1 seller), you would realize that Jim is more then mildly anal-retentive, a characteristic which bleeds over into his Forum. But there is still a lot of reasoned debate there, especially on Military topics.
Public debate is thousands of years old, all the WWW does is expand the scope of that debate. While the people that fought the introduction of the printing press because it would just encourage the masses to learn to read and write (Which would create a lot of problems) are long dead, their spiritual heirs are still among us. And they don't like the internet (WWW) any more then Pope Gregoray (I think, I'm not really up to speed on which pope did what to whom)did, what has them scared about blogging is the ease of it. Running a forum is pretty much a full time gig. You are outnumbered by 400 million or so and it's hard to keep track of all the posts. Blogs are much easier so there are more of them, which means those 400 million posters are spread out over many more blogs. It becomes not a matter of keeping up, but rather; 'did I get my share?'
The Mass appeal is what scares and attracts the powers that be. Koffi is thinking, if I had 1/10 of a cent off every email, that would be several million bucks a day. I could give the rest to the UN and we could tell the USA to go have aerodynmic intercourse with an oscilliating toroid pastery. And The EU is thinking that if it wasn't for the Bloggers we would have sneaked the Constitution thru and we would all be RICH, Rich, I tell you!
China is thinking, if we don't control the internet the Chinese will start to blog and then we will lose control. And losing control means losingpower. That means either death or worse, rice farming in a Yellow River village. The Gang of 77 are all turd worlders who think that it's majic and if they have an internet, they will sudenly become wealthy and powerful.
So bloggers are under attack and if they don't act quickly to organize and defend them selves, they will join T-Rex, the Dodo and Cindy Sheean in extinction. Will blogging be a blip on the radar of the 21st century ot a foretast of the future? That is up to the bloggers to decide.
E-Mail your congressthing.

Wow. That's certainly a lot of feedback. I see what you meant by forum, now. Thanks for all the input.

I think the problem with forums is how quickly they can degenerate into arguments, name-calling etc. The only way around this, as you point out, is lots of editing by the webmaster to keep things on point.

I think we have pretty good conversations around here, but I don't mind that we then shift to something new every day or so. I think that may have to do more with my range of interests and attention span than anything else.

Being the new guy on the street when it comes to blogging. I like the diversity. Some great ideas and thoughts. Not all to my taste. But what strikes me as unique with this format is the possibility that anyone could pass along their ideas to a main player. Doesn't matter what type of player it is. Politics, Business, even your local school system. As more people start reading blogs the amount of ideas being passed around will be unimaginable.
I for one am looking forward to these discussions and changing times.
With all of the different blogs going on and the MSM now commenting on them it, is becoming harder for any one type of media to control the news.
And I think a lot more heads will explode on the left and right as everyone starts getting more and more ideas from different sources and do not rely on the old MSM.

My $.02 (US) is that blogs are a meshy form of news and information dissemination. Much as packet networks use multiple paths to assure traffic delivery, the multiplicity of blogs assure dissemination of information -- sometimes fact-based, sometimes opinion-based, sometimes hard to tell...

In a sense, they may be the latest, electronic equivalent of the pamphleteers of pre-Revolutionary America -- many, various, all with their own interpretation of events, and impossible to completely throttle, though oppressive governments will always try. A somewhat intermediate form could be Samizdat, the self-published information that helped bring down one Evil Empire. Others have taken note, but going back is never really an option. I'd be more worried about governments taking some form of lateral move to establish control, if I could figure out a possible one.

DARPA and the DoD got ahead of themselves when they created the internet, and they will probably be the ones to eventually destroy it in the name of "national security" if people don't abandon it first for some other brilliant interface in order to escape the parasitic, money-sucking commercialism which has taken it over. Bloggers are becoming dangerous because for the first time a person can raise a question about what is going on or make a comment, and anyone around the world can read it and respond. Good guys, bad guys, allies, enemies, 6th-graders and the senile lady next door all theoretically have equal access. We thought we knew the internet was incompatible with countries like Saudi Arabia, but then Al-Jazeera came out and now dominates as the news source in the ME, NOT CNN or anything else, and the Saudis haven't formed an uprising yet; their neighbors have turned it around, AGAINST the West. Arabs now hear and read news on the internet their governments NEVER would have allowed 10 years ago. If there is anything that has finally unified the Arabs, it's Al-Jazeera and the internet. What's going to happen to China?

In the US it is a different story. For every "official" news source, there must be at least 10 "unofficial" news sources, giving us the gamut from plaigerized "official" stories to the outrageously unbelievable (though I think sometimes that they are one in the same). The line between what is truth and what is fiction is fading. "Official" media is losing ground to bloggers because people are getting sick of the sterility, constantly hearing the same one or two sides of a story, and the stupidness and irrelevence of most of the material. The Internet is dis-unifying Americans; while people used to have the freedom to have an opinion, now everyone has the freedom to log it or blog it and be their own "expert". This can cause serious damage to the agenda of ANY administration, and of course be a serious threat to national security, especially if the US came under attack.

I think that we haven't seen the end of the attack on mainstream media yet. This will go on I believe at least another ten years before any real changes occur. A lot has to do with the citizens themselves; change would be a lot faster if there was an all-out boycot of traditional media than if people are dropping the daily paper in favor of a Sunday-only subscription. Who knows? Africans with text messaging capabilities might somehow pose a danger one day or flip the entire institution on its head (I believe that the internet can finally be called an institution). We haven't seen the end of it; now it's just getting more interesting.

I don't see it as an attack on the MSM, but rather an evolutionary process. Nothing attacked the the Dinosaurs, but they aren't around anymore. The clincher will be when cell phones can provide streaming vido of a high quality over a local wireless conection. Then the cell phomne owners would be able to take live shots of news events and sell them over the net.
The technology is almost there. current cells provide stills well enough, its just they get to pixelated when they go to live video feeds. Once past that technical issue, every man becomes a reporter. That in turn allows anyone to become an editor. It's been established by bloggers that there is no shortage of commenters.
Short example. The riots in some podunk town a couple of days ago. The MSM had longrange vidcam shots from a heilo. If the technology was up to it we could have had close ups from a rioter with a cell phone. Which would you rather watch? Which would most people rather watch? This is what will doom the MSM. Doom might be to strong a word. The current broadcats networks will find themselves in the same position they put the AM radio stations in back when TV first went commercial.
It also possible that the MSM might just switch from manufacturing and controlling the news to distributing it. It would require a flexiabilty on their part I don't think they have, but hey, I'm wrong a lot.

I saw a TV show last night on PBS "American Experience" on the Vietnam War controversy through two simultaneous (but unrelated) events in Oct 1967 (if my memory serves). Not that good of a show; but the observation that I had was that neither side was talking to the other side. There was no dialog. When I think of "other people's problems" like the Israeli/Palestinian issue, it seems that dialog between the two parties is crucial. But for problems closer to home, the importance of dialog is easily forgotten in the emotions of moment.

The MSM does not provide any mechanism for dialog, while blogs provide an (albeit crude) mechanism for the two sides to talk to each other in public debate. The MSM may claim that having two people on a show constitutes dialog between two groups, but it doesn't come close because two people just can't remember everything on the spur of the moment.

The other thing about blogs is that there is no censorship. The MSM decides what to say and what not to say. The "what not to say" (for whatever reason) constitutes censorship. In this case, it is not government censorship like that seen in many Middle East countries, but is just as damaging to Truth. Blogs, lacking any mechanism for censorship (collectively), combined with the dialog, provides a successive approximation towards Truth that the MSM just doesn't have.

So dialog and lack of censorship I think are the two big differences (and improvements) between blogs and the MSM and both are important to Truth and to defusing (rather than inflaming) arguments.

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