Blog-o-cracy and Podcasting

A friend asked me what a blog was. I was explaining it to her when she seized on the fullness of the medium's capability in mid flight and she interrupted me by saying: "The democratic potential for this is enormous!" Yes, she had it.

Today, I came across a burgeoning blog network of political dissidents, and it is a wonderful thing, truly a thing to behold. Anyone with access to a keyboard and a web connection can become a self-publishing machine in a matter of minutes (right Tim?) to do all kinds of things. We have seen the impact of powerlineblog.com on the willful fibs of Dan Rather at CBS, for example, in their "Sixty First Minute."

Fighting tyranny is a whole other ball game, though. These dissenters are no mere rebels. In fact, a dissident and a rebel are not the same thing. You can see the potential for this network of a few to grow. There are already Syrians, Chinese, and Nepalese in the group. It will likely not be long before there are Palestinians and Zimbabweans, Cubans and Indonesians there as well. Having been at the receiving end of the disorder of tyrants myself, I am delighted that those who stand up against them have at their disposal yet another tool.

But the potential for the medium keeps growing. The man who taught me Soviet Politics, a Hungarian dissident who was imprisoned and tortured during the Hungarian Revolution came to the United States into exile (and later to Canada). While in the United States, he worked for Radio Free Europe. Today, a Canadian friend of Lebanese origin alerted me to the new edge of this medium (Thanks, Samerah). I can already picture our dissidents in Cuba or Iran having their own little Podcast Free Iran, Podcast FreeCuba, and so on.

Podcasting is the new rage. Well, not really. It's still too cutting edge to be a rage. But there are already thousands of podcasts on the web already. They consist of recording "radio shows" on Ipods, which are then uploaded to a website or a blog, and which people can download right into their pods to listen at their leisure. People are producing daily shows of all kinds. It does not take much to see how this is also going to change a few things, and propel a dozen or so people into fame and fortune. It is probably far away for its popularity to be exploited by dissenters, but the day will come, likely soon. People travel, and if someone were to organize a money collection for our friends in Iran or in Cuba, my guess is that the money would rain for them to have Ipods.

It will not be all peaches and cream. Blogs, already a dime a dozen, add to a very busy world of ideas, information, chatter, ranting, etc. It's about to get busier, and that is not always a good thing.