In the realm of online political commentary, there are blogs, and there are things which resemble or are thought to be blogs. It’s vital to know what’s what— not to castigate some as being on one side of the divide, but simply to help researchers and practitioners understand, what salient features they are referring to when they talk about “blogs.” A closer analysis is needed to understand which characteristics– including those that are inherent with the setup of the software, as well as those that are emergent— should be explored or employed for a particular situation.

I took a brief trip to the mid-nineties last weekend, going to my tenth high school reunion, leafing through some old Wired magazines, and picking up Thomas Frank’s 2000 book One Market Under God. A common theme: how did I view the “elites” then and now? Frank hypothesis, which he expanded in one of this year’s most informative political books, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, has been that an American political discourse continues to be defined by a demonization of the elites. This is not very much different from high school, as it turns out. Who the elites are, who gains by painting them as such, and whether they’re the same as the “mainstream” are questions we should consider– whenever we encounter someone raging against the media. Here’s a little exercise, weighing in at four thousand words.