Blogs have finally arrived: TV news has ingested them and made them its own.

MSNBC has a new feature on their morning "MSNBC News Live" show: NewsBlog. It's basically a news bite, sounding almost nothing more than trivia from the way it's presented, as the show comes back from commercial.

MSNBC seems to be working overtime to attract the eye of the younger crowd. Their news anchors stand at lucite lecturns rather than sit behind a desk. And they jam in as many spurts of news as they can between commercials.

Ooh, and one of the anchors just suggested doing a Google search to learn more about terrorist threats made to Christian sites at the Vatican. Why can't she do her research and tell us that information herself?

TV news doesn't seem to want to actually communicate the news to us anymore. It just wants to convey a sense of something newsworthy happening without actually giving us all of the details.

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Iranian blog'rs fight censorship 12/12/2003 10:02AM by Kelly

[Blogging News]

BBC News carries a story about Iranian bloggers who are protesting the blocking of access to thousands of Websites by the Iranian government. The decentralized nature of the blogs allow the protests to sneak under Iran's radar .

The story calls attention to the extroverted nature of blogs, which gives bloggers a sense of social responsibility. Since bloggers have a world-wide forum in which they can voice their opinions, many bloggers feel that they should take advantage of that forum and do some good.

Since blogs are difficult to regulate, they can be powerful agents for social change. Physical groups of people can easily be blocked from protesting in key locations, as seen when protestors against George W. were barred from where he would have heard them. The protestors could have used force against the security forces, but most protestors don't want to resort to that. Causing physical harm demeans their cause.

In the absense of physicality, blogs open up a whole new world of protesting. Millions of people can fight for a cause on an individual level. Getting millions of people to act individually towards the same end creates a decentralized collective that is impossible to block. Authorities cannot dismantle this type of protest "group" because there is no physical group to dismantle.

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