Measuring the Blogosphere - New York Times

The Times has posted an editorial on blogging. Typically, it contains lots of impressive words while saying very little.

If the blogosphere continues to expand at this rate, every person who has Internet access will be a blogger before long, if not an actual reader of blogs.

Anything growing rapidly will eventually fill its universe if it doesn't slow down; that's why nothing ever continues to expand rapidly. The Times has told us nothing with this observation.

The conventional media - this very newspaper, for instance - have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news.

Strangely, we never get to read the substance of these discussions, which would be more interesting than simply knowing that they occurred.

But blogs are often just a way of making oneself appear on the Internet. It's like a closed-circuit video camera that catches a glimpse of you walking by an electronics store window filled with televisions. There you are in all your glory, suddenly, if not forever, mediated.

Yeah, it's just like that. Except that you use a computer, you have to type stuff, and other people get to read it. Other than that it's just like standing in front of a store looking in. And just for the record, "mediated" does not mean to be seen on a medium as the Times uses it. These wordsmiths go on to finish with a flurry:

It's natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it's also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species. Emphasis added

Huh? Did anyone get that? I'm no New Yorker, but I'm no idiot either. If one accepts that one's writing represents one's thoughts, there is some murky thinking indeed at The Times.