One of the great things about regularly using blogs for reviewing news and events, at least as compared to mainstream news outlets, is that you will eventually find yourself well ahead of the information curve.
This is especially true for the televised broadcast and print versions of MSM news outlets, which can lag by weeks in coverage of items of interest (if ever), but less so for radio broadcast outlets which range from being current to lagging by several days. Compared to the lumbering of a TV news-gathering operation or the medieval pace of a modern newspaper newsroom, radio has an immediacy the others lack, plus the advantage of being able to be absorbed while the audience is engaged in other activities (such as driving a car), but still, even radio doesn't compare to what blogs have achieved in disseminating complex information to a wide and influential audience over their short existence.
In short, you can get a better, more accurate picture of current events through blogs and other online sources faster than you can through the old MSM outlets. Better, in that you can get perspective from a multitude of discrete witnesses of the events in question, rather than just a handful filtered by the bureaucratic layers that dominate MSM newsrooms. More accurate, in that the information cycle is fast enough in the blogosphere to allow for corrections of mistakes to be noted and disseminated to a wide audience in minutes and hours, and not the days or weeks later typical of major MSM news outlets, if they even acknowledge the errors.
For those blogging about current events, this advantage in information provides a unique platform for being able to influence decisions. Some examples:
InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds, a law-school professor, can ignite a campaign to strike pork-barrel spending from the federal budget to free funding to support disaster relief efforts with just handful of keystrokes.
A blog about shoes can influence purchasing decisions, and catapult the otherwise anonymous blogger into a six-figure income.
Heck, even a simple question asked by a little read blog might change people's driving habits.
The world of information is changing, and those who blog, along with those who read them, are changing it through the competitive advantage that comes from being ahead of the information curve. Today, they're reshaping the market for information - turning it away from the long-established outlets of the old media to the new information markets of the blogosphere. The only guarantee is that tomorrow's market for information will look very different from what we see today.
Welcome to the blogosphere's toolchest! Here, unlike other blogs dedicated to analyzing current events, we create easy-to-use, simple tools to do the math related to them so you can get in on the action too! If you would like to learn more about these tools, or if you would like to contribute ideas to develop for this blog, please e-mail us at:
ironman at politicalcalculations
Thanks in advance!
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