questionable power of blogging

Andrew Orlowski writes in The Register about the ability of google, combined with the copious amount that bloggers write, to essentially rewrite history. The phrase "second superpower" was coined in the New York Times back in February, to describe the antiwar movement. James Moore a month and a half later wrote using the same expression and it has become a loose description of the blogging world and not really about the war at all, more of an idealist view of how the world might change. Andrew Orlowski's is a good article and well worth reading. Maybe if enough people read it, then the real origin of the expression might become more widely known.

Update: I discussed this with Euan and read Kevin Marks, from Thursday 3rd of April. these people have revised my opinion a bit. Orlowski makes some reasonable points, though he treats webloggers as a group. The main essence I took was not the Joi Ito or other a-list weblogger bashing, but the Clay Shirky power law effect. No-one writes good stuff each and everytime, but the power law means that what ever the topic those heavily linked people will float to the top, each time. Then the usually blogging habit of linking to one another fills the top 10 slots in Google.

This example shows the care that we are bloggers must take when we are writing, there have been several instances of slight misrepresentation recently. Ben Hammersley notes an instance of a blogger, the Agonist, passing off pay-for journalism as his own. This was first noted on metafilter. Too feel good about what we do should we take a closer examination of our sources, or is the write it, link it, post it impulse too strong. I don't feel that we need to do the check everything twice approach of real journalism, as mostly we are writing on our own and this blogs are our opinions. However fair attribution and correcting your mistakes is the least that I feel we (I) should do for our (my) audience, checking your sources would help too.