Blogs

We are now witnessing a comprehensive revolution
in the way information is distributed, evaluated, and
catapulted into the nation's consciousness. Just ask
Eason Jordan.



Until late last week, Jordan was CNN's senior news
chief. All that changed when reports came out of
Davos, Switzerland and the World Economic Forum,
attributing nearly unbelievable comments to the news
executive. As reported, Jordan had claimed that
American soldiers had targeted certain reporters
and journalists in Iraq to be killed.



Within hours, "blogs" had jumped on the story,
tracking down the actual substance of the comments
and catching Jordan in a web of unsustainable denials.
By last Friday, the executive simply resigned,
explaining that he had "decided to resign in an
effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished
by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my
most recent remarks regarding the alarming number
of journalists killed in Iraq."



Eason Jordan seemed genuinely perplexed as he
attempted to deal with the controversy surrounding
his comments. Perhaps he should have called Dan
Rather, whose downfall was a direct result of information
distributed in the blogosphere. Better yet, he should
ask Hugh Hewitt, a world-class blogger whose new book,
Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's
Changing Your World, is the single best resource for
understanding this new and powerful information revolution.



As Hewitt explains, blog is shorthand for "weblog."
Just as the word log refers to a written record of events
and analysis, a blog is simply "a diary of sorts maintained
on the internet by one or more regular contributors."
Hewitt dates the first blog to about 1999. Now, there
are more than four million blogs--with several thousand
new blogs added each day.

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