on blogging and the web

web helps californians during wildfires:

It gave the village a set of drums to get the message out," said Gary Stebbings, a construction manager who monitored the Web site regularly after evacuating his home in the alpine town of Lake Arrowhead.
The phenomenon was "the ultimate democratization of the media," said Howard Rheingold, a futurist and author of "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution." "The AP has only so many reporters and CNN only has so many cameras, but we've got a world full of people with digital cameras and Internet access."

from Christopher Lydon,
Stirling Newberry (www.theclarksphere.com) -

"St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere... " In his own voice he continued: "That's the image you should have of what's happening on the Internet. Anyone on any given day can be the center if he has the best observation that resonates. There is no boundary of the circle... You get to sing a song and listen to the echo. You get to hear... how other people have taken what you've done and turned it into their center."

Doc Searls on The Media:

Yes, there's lots of stuff in all those media you'll like or use....But you have to wait for it if it's on a broadcast outlet or root for it in a publication. More importantly, you're not in charge. They are. And to Them, you're still just a consumer. A gullet for gobbling "content" and crapping cash. (Thank you for that perfect metaphor, Jerry Michalski.) Yes, Even if They are NPR and the New York Times. They are The Media. Information is a form of "content" that moves from Them to you, on an almost entirely one-way basis.

The Web is ours, not theirs.

Doc again - "blogging is one more way that the demand side is supplying itself"

Nate, from discussion on dan gillmor's site on govt attempts to erase history:

The key difference between "1984" and any attempts to emulate the rewriting of history today is the Web. Time after time politicians are caught by their saved words. The mainstream media may let them get away with pretending they "never said that," but the Web remembers...