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Blog Power

Entry 81, on 2004-11-05 at 13:34:04 (Rating 1, Computers)

I'm sorry to have to refer to that miserable election in the US again, but there was an interesting trend which was revealed there. The Internet is becoming more important as a news source, and a source of opinion and other information to people. According to one survey, its second only to newspapers as a source of news to people with fast Internet connections (a steadily increasing number).

Apparently a significant amount of that information came from blogs! Of course, blogs generally reflect opinions, rather than necessarily being 100% factual, but many of the better ones at least try to back up the opinions presented with supporting evidence. I would like to think I do that here, as well.

Of course, there are a lot of blogs out there and anyone can choose a blog which reflects their opinions and beliefs so you might think they aren't a particularly strong force in changing opinions. That's probably true to a large extent but that applies to any information source, and there are blog viewers with less well entrenched views who no doubt were influenced by them.

Another criticism of blogs is that they tend to be written by academics and technologists (who might more unkindly be known as geeks) who generally have more left wing, liberal political views. My blog might be cited as an example of this! While this is still basically true, there are more people with right wing fascist scum (sorry) ideas posting to blogs as well. First, because there have always been a lot of conservatives on the Internet; and second, because conservatives have finally figured out what a powerful tool this is.

So my advice is to keep looking at blogs (especially mine) but choose those which reflect a wide variety of different opinions, and choose blogs which are based on facts as well as opinion.

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