...and we do this crap for fun.

Well, at least until the insults start flying. Then it's just an annoyance.

yeah, it's all good fun until someone loses their grip.

The blogosphere is "open source" journalism vs. proprietary, by definition, limited resources journalism. Another good analogy is "free market" journalism vs. command economy journalism. Journalism, both free market and command economy, is the marketplace of ideas (i.e., information); and like the marketplace for goods and services, free markets always allocate scarce resources more efficiently than command systems simply because command systems cannot ever acquire and asimilate all the information necessary to optimize allocation (von Hayek, Schumpeter, Kuznets, et al) to the same degree as free markets can and do.

Bloggers got a bad rap because in the early days of blogging there were simply too few participants to manifest the "truth" signals that now permeate the blog space. A critical mass of sorts has been achieved but there's still a long way to go. It will take some time to mature but it will come. There are just as many incentives in the gift-giving culture of the blogosphere as there are in the command economy journalism profession.

In both cultures everybody wants to be the guy that everyone else says when they see them, "Isn't that the guy ...?" "Why yeah, that's the guy ..."

Dunno about you, Hugelu, but I'm perfectly content to have no face associated with my weblog. My family, and a few close friends, know about it. To the rest of the world, I'm just "gus3", and I like it that way.

Wow, Gus ... you're that guy? Love your blog!
;-)

That said, yes, Hulegu ... Metcalfe's Law at work.

Don't discount the positive effect that a little competitiion will have on both MSM and blogs.

For example, when the Christmas in Cambodia story broke and started resonating in spite of being ignored by the MSM, Byron York wrote a nice piece pulling together missing information (no doubt aided by access to resources not available to most bloggers).

Bloggers seem to be a little more thorough now that the spotlight is on them as well.

While the mode is new, the history of a citizen-journalist is rooted in Colonial times. With access to a printing press, pamphlets were mass produced to wide audiences challenging the "MSM" of its time. Thomas Paine's Common Sense was quite influencial and didn't earn him any friends among the authorities.

The MSM presents a story, and the blogosphere does a fact check and editing process on it. So, what's the problem? These are functions that the MSM does itself, with limited staff in comparison to he blogosphere, where scores, hundreds, perhaps thousands can dig into the case presented by the MSM.

The MSM should stop fighting the blogosphere and be grateful for all the free help. After all, they are dedicated to the pursuit of the truth, aren't they?

It's too bad that such a sloppy story could've been put out there by Rather and his fact-checkers, but it's also too bad that the "story" has been expunged from the record so completely. It would be any journalist's dream (one would hope) to find documents about the famouse Texas fly-boy, or his blow-days, or any of the wheeling the family did to keep his exploits under wraps and out of sight.