Wednesday, October 27, 2004 12:13 PM
It continues to amaze me how citizen bloggers raise issues that get picked up in the media and ultimately lead to either larger stories or at least conversations between government, the business world and the media (with the media acting like a proxy/mouthpiece for the citizen's questions).
Millions of people have long scoured websites for information, and ultimately every little bit of information likely gets noticed by somebody. That hasn't changed; what has changed is how that "found" information gets disseminated.
Prior to weblogs, people could disseminate this information via email, the phone and among their network of friends and acquaintances. Ultimately, with a few exceptions, the information was conveyed to a relatively small circle of people and went no further. On the other hand, in a growing number of cases, people who find information and post it on their weblog have seen the information disseminated worldwide in a matter of minutes. And, anyone who says there are not reporters out there who tap into the blogosphere on occasion for news leads is just ignoring reality.
A recent case in point. Brad Friedman, who maintains BradBlog, reported earlier this month on his weblog that he noticed the documents and audio files that had previously been posted on the White House website were now missing.
His postings ultimately found their way to a couple of reporters at The Washington Post, who wrote the following blurb on the subject:
Those White House Links to Nothing
The Coalition of the Willing has disappeared.
The list of names of countries supporting the U.S.-led military action in Iraq has been removed from the White House Web site. Blogger Brad Friedman, who noticed the disappearance, believes this is part of a widespread 'scrubbing' of documents on the government site. Gone are links to the audio and video of President Bush's statement that 'I'm not that concerned' about Osama bin Laden, a Q&A when Bush said 'misunderestimate' and Bush's acknowledgment that his decision making on stem cell policy was 'unusually deliberative for my administration.'
Jimmy Orr, who handles the content for the White House site, said nothing nefarious was intended. 'We have some 80,000 pages and 3,000 video and audio links,' he said. 'When we republish pages and move files, some links are bound to go down, and there are bound to be dead pages.' So staffers are 'clicking on every single audio and video link on our site' to make sure they work.
As for the Coalition of the Willing? 'This coalition list was dated and inaccurate,' Orr said. He said another will be posted 'as soon as we get a new one' -- without countries such as Costa Rica, which last month asked to be removed from the list. '"
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link to article]
Whether or not one accepts the White House's explanations on this point, the more interesting item here is the reality that an average citizen utlizing his weblog ultimately led to a line of questioning between the media and our government officials that may have otherwise never occurred. Via his weblog, Brad Friedman had questions about the White House website and was able to get a direct response to these questions. When people talk about transparency in government, this scenario certainly comes to my mind. If weblogs become a valuable enabler for citizens to take questions and concerns directly to their government officials and get thoughtful responses, the institution of representative government may be the biggest winner.