Blogs have been keeping lots of people on their toes; people who normally wouldn't have to worry about someone publicly dicing them into pieces have had exactly that done to them.
In the States, CBS' Dan Rather basically had his hat handed to him, followed by a slap across the face for being donkey-assed silly. Blogs caught on to an indiscretion, fanned the flames to make it an issue -- ultimately leading to a red faced Mr Rather and CBS, a leading media organization, to admit it made a "mistake".
Jeff Ooi's Screenshots has been doing the same in Malaysia. Organizations as prestigious as Maxis, MAS, TMnet, the NST, etc. have all fallen prey to the bitch-slapping-snipering that is Jeff's style. Lately i've noticed that Jeff actually has to do very little: the popularity of Screenshots has allowed it to become a platform for remote-launched missiles -- readers writing in with their gripes, their emails getting public print, outrage and disgust normally following from Screenshots' many readers, usually leading to an apology or explanation of some sort from the offending Co., again publicly published.
I won't be surprised if sometime soon, someone coins a phrase that changes Screenshots from a noun to a verb: "You've been "Screenshot-ted" (read: publicly embarassed on Jeff's site)".
How has all of this been possible? My money is on the fact that more people use the Internet now than ever before; be it in the US, or Europe, or in Malaysia, or anywhere else in the world -- the Internet reaches more of us more effectively now than ever before in human history. And that trends shows no end to slowing down.
Emerging technologies crop up all the time to allow us to be even more connected to the Internet. 3G phones. IPv6 (where every device conceivable will be Internet-enabled!). Cheaper broadband. Smaller, faster, cheaper computers.
The proliferation of the Internet is the lifeblood of blogs and the main reason why they are beginning to have such an impact on everday (realworld) life. The invention of the printing press brought about a revolution -- information replicated and transfered at never-before rates. With the Internet providing the technological basis, could blogs be this century's printing press?
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