HW#19 Web of Influence

After reading the assigned chapter from David Kline and Burstein's "Blog!" I chose a paragraph from page 88. In this paragraph they talked about how the skewed network makes it easier and less time consuming for the outside readers to acquire information. For example they say that the media only needs to look at the elite blogs to obtain a summary of the distribution of opinions on a given political issue. In other words, they can put in a key word about their issue, and that will be pulled up, letting them not have to go searching through a huge variety of topics. They talk about how bloggers can post their immediate reaction to the important political events before other forms of media can respond. But above all, when they are confronted with a factual error, they can quickly correct and update their post. This makes things a lot easier for the writer to make things right. Also the comparative advantage of blogs in political discourse, as compared with the traditional media, is their low cost of real-time publication. To put it another way, they are saying how most blogs are free, you can easily just sign up with a website and start posting right then and their, as with the traditional media, like in newspapers, it costs money to actually post something in the paper. Overall I think that this paragraph was important because it's reminding you how easy it is to make a blog and start posting your veiws and information about certain issues. And also how readers can easily respond to your post, and let you know what their veiws are on the subject.