Lessig

I like this part:

"Very small blogs are individual blogs, where you may every once in a while find tidbits that have something to do with big media -- like the guy who noticed the Dan Rather letter. Then there are these [mid-size] niche things, which are focused on certain issues, [and whose creators] read all these little blogs. Then there are these big blogs like BoingBoing, which I think are like an amplifier. When they hit a certain threshold, the mainstream media picks it up and broadcasts it out to the rest of the world. When the mainstream media talks about something, it synchronizes everybody in the blogosphere to start thinking about the topic, and it goes back again to the mainstream. So it's becoming, I think, a very interesting ecosystem of people interested in issues."

How true. Paraphrased: There's the Little People, The Beat Reporters, and The Big Heads. Very hierarchical, just like the mainstream media, but replicated on a smaller scale.

By the way, there's a small error in the paragraph above - the first comments on the Dan Rather/60 minutes story were not on an individual blog, but on FreeRepublic, a very large discussion site. Interestingly, those comments were by an extremely well-connected right-wing lawyer. Some people have read more into that than I think the evidence can support - but that little fact tends to be omitted when blog evangelists tell the story, because they want to push the fantasy of an ordinary guy having an effect, while that person was most definitely not just an ordinary guy (i.e. he doesn't have to be an agent of Karl Rove to be at the political level where Rove would take his phone calls).

IMHO The difference in the blogged model is that there is the opportunity to publish for all, and that there is a broader range of reasons why a story will be talked about futher. The selection of ideas which reach larger blogs can be due to niche interest groups, general interest in the idea or situation in the post, commercial interest, political interest. The spectrum of groups is wider and the resulting information flow is more diverse, textured and frankly informative than the slick homogenised mono sausage we get through traditional models.

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