THE RISE OF BLOG
An interesting dispatch on the blog phenomenon from a print-newspaper editor venturing into blog. By the tone of the piece, you can tell he's a bit annoyed by the new competition:

Those perched on the political fringes have found a home on the Internet. True believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue. There are blogs devoted to the right, blogs devoted to the left, blogs devoted to exposing the vast and devious media conspiracy, blogs defending and attacking, well, almost anything that mirrors one individual's view of the world.

If Hitler were alive today, he'd have his own blog.

Some of the big bloggers got mad about the Hitler line but I think it's fair. A new medium can spread evil ideas as well as good ones, and it's up to individual readers and bloggers to sort them out in their own consciences and move things in the right direction.

But the editor is wrong to emphasize "those perched on the political fringes." Certainly there are such blogs. But the most successful bloggers are usually 1) more or less "centrist" or "moderate," and 2) adopt "mix-and-match" positions, both because a) that's what they think, and b) it shows their readers that they're independent. Andrew Sullivan is a foreign-policy hawk and a true believer in limited government, but he supports gay marriage; Glenn Reynolds is a libertarian who enjoys mocking Bush-bashers but dislikes the far right, and whose real political orientation is techno-futuristic; Mickey Kaus is a Democrat who endlessly derides his party, and hilariously Kerryphobic; Josh Marshall runs a "center-left" blog, efficiently drawing attention to the Bush Administration's dirty laundry but not venturing into people-vs.-the-powerful populism or left-liberal big-government paternalism.

Dan Drezner's academic paper on blogs is more balanced.