Blogging

What a dumb title, but perhaps not. Just as I'm not sure of I'll keep this thing I'm never sure what to name what I'm writing about. Often by the time I'm done, a new title -- a much better one -- comes to me so I change it. It might happen again, I hope it does, at which point I'll delete this paragraph and you'll never see it or the lamentations in it.

From the start, at the beginning of this month when I all I was trying to do was get a sign in to a friends blog and somehow ended up with one of my own, I've made no secret that I'm not sure whether or not I'll just hit DELETE and make it disappear.

I got an email the other day from a good friend at No Shades of Gray offering encouragement. Through blogs, he said, almost anyone with a mind and something to say now have a means by which they can be heard. That holds true also, he noted, for complete idiots but that those are quickly weeded out.

So I'm sitting here tonight glancing through some of the most popular blogs, blogs that get thousands of hits on daily basis, and noticed an entry at Instapundit linking to an "Interesting OPED": Blogs can help democracy, especially in partisan times.

The mainstream press has frequently been called the fourth estate because of the watchdog function it serves in keeping an eye on government.

A key issue recently has been whether anybody is keeping an eye on the press.. . .

That role is increasingly served by bloggers.. . .

Blog readers must scrutinize blog material carefully and put it in context with the political information they get from more traditional sources.

Read the whole thing here.

My friend's email and the oped meshed, which is why I guess I'll keep blogging, for a little while anyway. At least until after the election, which will extend through gawd only knows when while the DNC's attorneys . . .

I'm doomed.