There was an excellent discussion about blogging on today’s edition of Odyssey, the daily talk show hosted by Gretchen Helfrich on Chicago Public Radio. (Audio of the program is here.) The guests were Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber and Eugene Volokh of the eponymous Conspiracy. Host and guests were all smart enough to cut quickly through the equally bad caricatures of blogging-as-personal-diary and blogging-as-replacement-for-journalism that seem to be so prevalent out there in the complement of the blogosphere. They spoke eruditely about the uses of distributed communication networks, and elucidated the really useful purposes to which blogs can be put, including as sources of specialized knowledge and as alternative filters to an overwhelming stream of news items. (See also Eszter’s comments.) Worth a listen.
What wasn’t mentioned was the hidden expertise of the Odyssey crew: senior producer Josh Andrews recently started his own blog, The American Sector, and Gretchen was briefly a guest-blogger right here at Preposterous. No wonder they were able to uncover the deep truths of blogging so expeditiously.