Salon features a book excerpt from Scott Rosenberg, an essay on how blogs have changed everything. It's an argument that legacy media miscalculated the Web and continues to miscalculate the value of the voices blogs bring.
Rosenberg believes the arrival of the blog is akin to the arrival of the telephone, a new form of communication that will take its own shape, and he is highly critical of those who dismiss their impact or suggest there are too many. Even if the audience is only the writer and his mother, he says, that at least binds the writer and his mother.
Moreover, "we can now see that collectively they constitute something unprecedented in human history: a new kind of public sphere, at once ephemeral and timeless, sharing the characteristics of conversation and deliberation. Blogging allows us to think out loud together. Now that we have begun, it's impossible to imagine stopping."
