Geocaching, Anyone?

/

Been too cold for 'caching in recent weeks, but with the sunny weather and the temperature hovering above freezing, I'm thinking Saturday might be a good day to go out. (Provided it's not raining, of course.) Looking for a cache under a foot of snow sucks, but it looks like most of the snow is melting. Anyone interested in going? If so, email me at Tom at Hespos.com.

Radioactive Zombies, Beware!

/

Sunday shooting got a heck of a lot better this week. Craig, Dennis, Dan and I had our Sunday at the range, and everyone seemed to be shooting a lot better than they have in the past. Dan hasn't shot in years and he's already right back into the swing of things. We threw some rabbits with the new thrower for the first time. There's still a thin coating of ice and snow on the ground at the range, so the clays were slowed down significantly once they hit the ground. I can't wait for the snow to melt so we can see how far and fast we can throw rabbits with it.

Dan and I had a little stint where we were alternating triples. We both managed to hit five sets of triples in a row.

While honing our skills for the day when the radioactive zombies descend on our homeland to eat our brains and steal our precious bodily fluids, we talked about all sorts of other stuff, including the piece I sent Dan last week about crackdowns on blogs and political speech. He was bringing up a bunch of stuff about the other provisions of McCain-Feingold that are ridiculous on their face.

I need this on Sundays, just to clear my head and de-stress.

On Remoras and Pilot Fish

/

From this piece of utter bilge...

But just as CNN was never really able to reinvent itself to be indispensable for anything except covering wars and tsunamis, one can imagine the blogs settling in forever at their present level of almost wholly media-on-media impact. For now, bloggers are a second-tier journalistic species. They are remoras. The Times and CNN and CBS News are the whales and sharks to which Instapundit, Kausfiles, and Kos attach themselves for their free rides. (Remoras evolved special sucking disks; bloggers have modems.) If the sharks and whales were to go extinct, what would the blogging remoras do? Evolve into actual reporters?

Sadly, no!

I'm simply at the end of my rope with folks pretending they can't understand the function of bloggers unless they're judged against our conceptions of what a journalist is. And then there are the folks (like Andersen) who seem to think that the blogging community is nothing more than a bunch of mobile, self-appointed ombudsmen who are making a living solely by calling the mainstream media on their bullshit.

The role of ombudsman is just one of the important roles falling to bloggers in this day and age. (And wouldn't you agree that many of them are doing a bang-up job of it?) But there's a whole lot more to it. Every day, when I sit down at my desk with my lunch and visit my favorite blogs, I find the advancement of ideas every which way I turn. A lot of these ideas are original thoughts and concepts that haven't even been kicked around in the MSM. Or if they have, they haven't received nearly the coverage they deserve. For every post about such-and-such journalist bullshitting his way through a story, there's a piece (Promoted from the Kos diaries? Taken up by Atrios?) that extends an original idea. Maybe it has to do with Social Security, maybe it has to do with the war, but all of these posts have something in common - they attempt to take an original idea, give it a start in the blogosphere, and get people talking about those ideas.

Andersen likens bloggers to remoras hitching a ride on the MSM. The last time I even thought about remoras, it was when I was doing a sixth-grade report on sharks. And IIRC, there was another fish that always seemed to be mentioned in the same sentence as the remora - the pilot fish. This fish swims out ahead of the shark, appearing to lead it along. I'd liken the role of the blogger to that of the pilot fish. Ideas are hashed out in the blogosphere and the MSM eventually picks up on some of them.

You can't tell me that the MSM hasn't picked up on many of the ideas coming out of the blogosphere. We've broken too many stories, come up with some original ideas, and have shown thought leadership all the way through. Who is leeching off of whom in many of these cases?

For instance, haven't I been writing here that the blogosphere represents a return to the "Marketplace of Ideas" concept put forth by SCOTUS Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes? And then some guy named Andersen comes out with an article in New York Metro saying pretty much the same thing, but getting it wrong as to the role of the blogger. Isn't it ironic?