Aravosis

Aravosis had an interesting take on the Andrew vs HRC mud-slinging event.

The Blade reports that the "groundswell" of gay-oriented blogs against the HRC are not really that influential. His point is that everyone reads Andrew's blog (and his) and these other sites don't have any signficant traffic.

His point is duly noted.

I would offer that Andrew's blog does not happen in a vacuum - nor does AmericaBlog. I also offer that bloggers sift about their surroundings for ideas and information. This sort of quasi-collective thought is dependent upon where you get your information and how you gather it. But when a range of people begin discussing an idea, a range of opinions are offered up and additional information comes forth and major themes come to the fore.

While it is true that Andrew has the biggest megaphone, information flows back and forth across the web in the form of the blog-conversation between people of varying levels of "exposure". The flow of information is largely invisible and almost always assymmetric in real time - but looking back upon the arc of a story, it is clear that information and ideas are continually flowing around.

So when Aravosis says "The driving force here is Andrew", I'd posit that that might be a little too clean and tidy.

Having been doing research forever, I know that "novel" ideas are extremely rare but that the person with the biggest grants and best papers tend to be the best at gathering info, synthesizing it, and presenting it as their own "idea". Most ideas come from an amalgam of individual insight and external information - in science and in the media. I definitely think that the success of AmericaBlog is due to alot of external contributions (both active and passive). In a similar vein, I would say that just because people do not have a big readership that they should be marginalized as unimportant or peripheral.