My Guardian column this is week is a followup to the grander, cosmic meaning of l’affairianna Huffington and Walgate (it’s here and here). A snippet:
What is a blog? Well, there’s the most frequently asked question of the age. But the answer has nothing to do with the tools and technology that make this phenomenon possible. No, it’s quite simple, actually: a blog is a person in conversation. In this age when every message is manufactured, metered, spun, filtered, and flacked, that is precisely what makes blogs so refreshing: their humanity.
And that is why a scandal erupted in the blog world when George Clooney announced that he did not write what was attributed to him at HuffingtonPost.com, a US group blog….
he Huffington and Walgate affairs reveal less about blogs than about the media world they leave behind, where the words attributed to the powerful, rich and famous rarely actually come out of their mouths anymore….
