By Matt for the TIB Network:
Just caught Hugh Hewitt on Dayside with(out) Linda Vester discussing...Year of the Blog: Was 2004 the year that Web logs aka "blogs" came into their own? When we look back on the presidential election and the "Memogate" scandal at CBS will we point to blogs as a crucial element influencing both of these events? Find out the answers when Hugh Hewitt, author of "Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World" joins us this afternoon for a provocative look at these questions and more!An interesting segment...
Equally interesting was Glenn Reynolds' review of BLOG:
I FINISHED HUGH HEWITT'S NEW BOOK ON BLOGS LAST NIGHT, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who's interested in blogs, new media, or public relations.I'm looking forward to reading the book when it gets here from Amazon. Have you ordered your copy yet?
There's a history of blogs, an analogy between the changes blogs are bringing to the media priesthood and the Reformation (with which I heartily agree) and -- most significantly -- a lot of good advice to businesses, of both the media and non-media varieties, on how they can use blogs to help themselves, and how to avoid becoming, like Trent Lott or Dan Rather, the focus of a damaging "opinion storm." He also catches on (actually, I think Hugh was one of the first to make this point, in a post on his blog) to the importance of what Chris Anderson is calling the Long Tail -- that in the aggregate, the vast hordes of small blogs with a few dozen readers are more important than the small number of big blogs with hundreds of thousands of readers. (Here's an article on that topic by Anderson, from Wired.) I think that's absolutely right, and Hugh has some interesting things to say about it. (And journalists mostly don't get this point at all -- every time I get interviewed it seems that they want firsts, mosts, and biggests, when I keep telling them that the real story of the blogosphere is the day-to-day interaction and writing of a whole lot of blogs).
Cutting to the chase (which is what blogs do, right?): This is the best book on blogs yet, which isn't surprising since it's by a successful blogger who also knows a lot about communications and the world in general. I'm sure it will get a lot of attention within the blogosphere, but I hope that it will get a lot of attention elsewhere, because the people who really need to read it are the people who won't find out about it from blogs. Best quote: "Blogs are built on speed and trust, and the MSM is very slow and very distrusted."
