Railing against blogs due to a large number of sorry blogs is like railing against poetry due to a large number of sorry poems or against email due to a large number of sorry messages. [...] One doesn't rail against a genre or a medium just because a large majority of pieces produced in or through it are mediocre or worse. Technorati claims that it is "[c]urrently tracking 44.8 million sites and 2.6 billion links" -- probably, by now a majority of blogs are written in languages most LBO-talk subscribers can't read and therefore can't really evaluate.
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Precisely right.
And I'll go a step further to say there are English-language -- but non American -- blogs of great interest many Americans could obviously read but know nothing about.
I track several art/tech/culture/science blogs,all written in English, all based out of (and focused on events) in Japan, Europe and S. Korea
..
Here's what happens in the US...
By "blog", most Americans who think about these things mean "political blog". And by "political blog" most mean blogs that comment (with varying amounts of skill and usefulness) on news events reported on by the MSM.
Outside of that cage's walls there are, as far as many are concerned, no blogs worth talking about.
So, to consider another close-to-home example of excellence (the previous one being Dennis Perrin's Red State Son), a feminist blog such as Bitch|Lab doesn't rate because there isn't a daily 'oh my god' rant about the glories, or evils, of the Bush administration.
But my god, I'm repeating myself. Every time this topic comes up I write -- more or less -- the same thing.
In other news (and speaking of the MSM)...
It appears the super security effort that was supposed to lock down Baghdad (capitalizing, the story goes, on the death of Zarqawi) has failed:
7 explosions hit Baghdad within 5 hours
<http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/iraq>
.d.
--------- They say evil prevails if good men do nothing. What they should say is, evil prevails.
Lord of War