COM 150: Read and discuss (post below)

Here are a couple of things for you to read along with the "kid with a modem" piece on the Danwei website in Beijing. They'll give you three points of view on how the internet appears to be opening up the political process to people who aren't traditional "gatekeepers," i.e. interested citizens, bloggers and, yeah, kids with modems. Once you've followed the links, read all three, thought about them for a minute or two and discussed it with classmates sitting near you, post your thoughts as comments to this blog.

Here's a good overview in USA Today. It appeared three years ago, at the end of 2003, and that's a lifetime or more on the World Wide Web. But it gives the main outlines of the blogosphere. Says staff writer :

The freewheeling, gossipy Internet sites they operate can be controversial: Matt Drudge, the wired news and gossip hound who broke the story about Monica Lewinsky's affair with Bill Clinton, is a blogger. Many bloggers are not professional journalists. Few have editors. Most make no pretense of objectivity.

Yet they're forcing the mainstream news media to follow the stories they're pushing, such as the scandal that took down Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. And they've created a trend that almost every major presidential candidate is following. Even President Bush's campaign Web site hosts a blog.

Lott, R-Miss., is still in the U.S. Senate. And Drudge is still blogging. And the mainstream media are blogging now more than ever before. Here's a link to "The Swamp," a political blog on the Chicago Tribune's website. Unlike the daily Trib (in which it doesn't appear), the blog is updated several times a day -- as the news happens.

I found the USA Today profile by searching keywords "politics" and "bloggers" in Google. Why don't you do the same? Then post your thoughts, along with interesting nuggets of fact you found out, as comments to this message.