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Blogging vs. Messageboards
There are plenty of 'deep thought' blogs out there which offer more than the standard snippet of commentary and reflection, but there are also a number of blogs, especially in the political realm, that are simply zingers and one-liners--little better than a messageboard of slams and counterslams. I recall over a decade ago when I was building the first websites for my law school and trying to help professors understand what the Internet really was. One of them, a graying, near retirement professor with an academic record so long it would take pages to list, came to me with an quick 'thought piece' he had written regarding a Supreme Court case. It was too short and too 'easy' for publishing in an academic journal, but too heavy for a thing like a 'letter to the editor' so he asked me about publishing it on USENET (yeah, back in the day). I went into some usenet groups and pulled out some other pieces that people had published, but also the insane and inane commentary of 12-year-olds-like posters that followed. He took a look at some of the comments and said "who needs that" and ended up just filing this little thing away, never to see the light of day. Sadly, so many political blogs are just a collection of this sort of brain dead commentary. As Michael Heseltine once said (John Major's Defense Minister) to some hecklers--"Open mouths and closed minds" do not make a debate.
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