Blogging puts us in the midst of a new and fascinating communications reformation that is seeing the rise of an information democracy of the sort that Huey Long would have called "every man a king."

Today, everybody has the potential to be a highly disseminated lightning speed communicator. The trouble, as the recent Rick Redfern layoff segment in Doonesbury illustrated, is that having a blog doesn't mean you communicate with it. We have the potential for about 6 billion bloggers worldwide. Personally I don't have the time to read that many blogs.

So I suspect there will be some sort of aggregation, blog writers' groups and such, and that each of us will end up with personalized news that will give us the same sort of fragmented picture of the world that the Sufi tale "the blind men and the elephant," gave us, each seeing the world we have filtered from our version of the news.

(See http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html for the Sufi tale.)

Funny you should ask, Lisa, I have always been a fan of margarine. But you're right. Thanks for catching the error. I just fixed it.

Imagine if Stewart did this with his audience. They would definitely follow him to the Promise Land.

Um - that's Promised Land. Right? Or is there a margarine utopia I should know about?

Good writing is hard. Harder than can be coped with here, apparently.

In the main message we can read: "who suggested blogging about trivial topics is a waste of people’s time."

But "trivial" was left out of the sucker-copy that dragged me in here, and it is left out of the "blogging" above,. except for getting the quote right.

God save us all from lousy writing, done carelessly, by non-thinkers blogging about trivial topics.

Where's the info about Huffy getting $25 million from some venture capitalists? That's important.

BAK

It's an apples and oranges comparison, really. The fact is the consumers of much of the television content out there are not the same consumers of most of the blog content in the Internet. With limited resources (time) in the workday and all of Stewart's other commitments, he's made the right choice to focus on thirty minutes of someone's attention in the living room each night he's on the air.

If a comedian wants real feedback, he performs standup.

To try and stretch this to cover your favorite CEO is, I think, a stretch. Not only are most CEO's not well-equiped to do standup, their enterprises could derive measurable benefits from interacting with employees and/or customers.

A comedian with his own writing staff and unreleting deadline, on the other hand, would probably not see his material improve all that much if he tried to blog in his "free time."

@ Mike- Would you not play in, say, a 16-inch softball league just because people like Carlos Quentin and A-Rod crush the ball against major league pitching? I disagree with your sentiment.

I think if you love writing (or baseball, or whatever) you gotta get your own rocks off.

Even if it is, as Don Ball put it, just pushing ahead with your own blog, the challenge is will always be to make a fresh, truthy point.

It may seem like you're Sisyphus, but at least it's fun to watch your boulder roll down the other side of the mountain, right?

There's tremendous benefit when media people (TV hosts, journalists etc) blog about the stuff that does not make the main story. It counters the trend to the sound-bite and the USA Today-izing of news. For instance, a full transcript of an interview can be a valuable resource for anyone who wants to read the broader context - not all will, but having it available on the blog enables access for those who do.

While journalists and corporate communications teams perform a valuable editorial service by selecting the most important aspects of a story, letting us have access to "the stuff that didn't make it" is useful. Before blogging it would have killed too many trees to do this. Now, it just pumps a few more tons of CO2 into the atmosphere as the server farms fill up with minutia - but that's another issue (to blog about).

Blogging is like downloading your subconscious to a continuous news feed. Just the word "Blog" sums it up. BLAH-g. Blah, blah, blah, blog.

Nice post. It's a very familiar discussion. For now, I've stopped trying to convince people and just keep pushing ahead with my own blogging. On occasion, a friend or client will come around on their own. When that happens, it's nice to be able to have a great conversation about the hows, instead of the whys.

Jon Stewart is right. He shouldn't be blogging about the stuff that doesn't make it on his show. Arianna Huffington is also right, at least, in what she says on what blogging is about.

Not everyone should blog. Some people are more cut out for it than others. I don't have a blog because you know what? I realize that even though I have an opinion on something, somebody is probably already saying the same thing on some other blog, better than I probably could, before I could post it and will have many, many more readers.

For internal purposes though, most companies should have some form of a blog for employees to read; keeping them up to date on the goings on of their company. Whether that is written by the C-suite is up to you, but make sure whoever is writing it, wants to write it and can eloquently put down in words what they would like to say.