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Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity
Charlie Mingus, jazz bass player

The Blog, The Press, The Media: Blogosphere
The great appeal of blogging for many is, as Dissident Frogman put it: the perspective of a private space offered to a wide public viewing, where one can voice his opinion, keeping at bay the hassle of constant interruption by the Know-Better and the Nay-Sayer, while maintaining a direct channel open between people worth arguing with.
Tim Dunlop jokes that the appeal is that it turns everybody into Rupert Murdoch. A very small and poor Rupert Murdoch, but a Rupert Murdoch nonetheless. Sheila O’Malley says that every day is a lively conversation, a point echoed by Anne Cunningham: The main appeal is finding interesting people I would never have met otherwise; and I particularly like that you get to know them through their ideas. Norman Geras reflects, It helps you to think things through which you otherwise might not, in order to be able to post sensibly about them. Kevin at Boots on the Ground writes that it’s like a journal where people can see what’s happening, and how they are perceived by many soldiers.
A few bloggers, however, were not sanguine about blogging’s effect on the mainstream media. Dissident Frogman said that he did not think
there would be any impact on the French media, which thinks itself such an untouchable caste of superior and faultless beings, deaf and immune to any external challenge, which due to what he called a collusion between the state, the unions and the press created a very effective way to control what’s being published. For blogging to have any possibility of impact, he said, it would require a change on a much deeper scale in the French landscape, and the emergence ... of a truly diversified press which is non-existent at the moment.
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