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So I see that the second-most interesting article about blogs in the New York Times today got a lot of attention. That would be K. Daniel Glober's op-ed on the increased linkages between bloggers and political candidates: The Netroots.? ?People Power.? ?Crashing the Gate.? The lingo of liberal Web bloggers bespeaks contempt for the political establishment. The same disdain is apparent among many bloggers on the right, who argued passionately for a change in the slate of House Republican leaders ? and who wallowed in woe-is-the-party pity when the establishment ignored them. You might think that with the kind of rhetoric bloggers regularly muster against politicians, they would never work for them. But you would be wrong. Over the past few years, bloggers have won millions of fans by speaking truth to power ? even the powers in their own parties ? and presenting a fresh, outsider perspective. They are the pamphleteers of the 21st century, revolutionary ?citizen journalists? motivated by personal idealism and an unwavering confidence that they can reform American politics. But this year, candidates across the country found plenty of outsiders ready and willing to move inside their campaigns. Candidates hired some bloggers to blog and paid others consulting fees for Internet strategy advice or more traditional campaign tasks like opposition research.... The trend seems certain to continue in 2008. Potential presidential hopefuls like Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain already are paying big-name bloggers as consultants, and Julie Fanselow of Red State Rebels said on her blog she would entertain job offers from Howard Dean, Barack Obama, John Edwards or Al Gore. ?This intersection isn?t going away,? Jerome Armstrong of MyDD, an elite blogger hired by campaigns, wrote earlier this year, ?and I hope more and more bloggers are able to work to influence how campaigns are run.? Here is a listing of some of the most influential bloggers who went to work for campaigns this year, what they were paid according to campaign disclosure documents, and praiseworthy posts about their employers or critical ones of their employers? opponents.As William Beutler points out, this op-ed has not had the best of reactions in the blogosphere -- in large part because the piece could give the impression that some campaign bloggers did not act up to the Times' ethical standards. Me,I just yawned, and recalled what I wrote about this six months ago: What's going on is not illegal, or even out of the ordinary in Washington, DC. It's politics as usual. The only reason the story is noteworthy is because bloggers... have persistently said that they and theirs -- a.k.a., the netroots -- are not about politics as usual. Over time, however, that claim looks less and less viable. The question is whether bloggers... find that their legions of readers are turned off by these kind of revelations, or whether they comfortably adjust into being middleweight power brokers.... In other words, the gates have been crashed.Now, the most interesting story about blogs in the NYT today was Clive Thompson's cover story in the magazine about how blogs and wikis could prove useful structures for intelligence analysis: [T]hroughout the intelligence community, spies are beginning to wonder why their technology has fallen so far behind ? and talk among themselves about how to catch up. Some of the country?s most senior intelligence thinkers have joined the discussion, and surprisingly, many of them believe the answer may lie in the interactive tools the world?s teenagers are using to pass around YouTube videos and bicker online about their favorite bands. Billions of dollars? worth of ultrasecret data networks couldn?t help spies piece together the clues to the worst terrorist plot ever. So perhaps, they argue, it? s time to try something radically different. Could blogs and wikis prevent the next 9/11?.... Intelligence heads wanted to try to find some new answers to this problem. So the C.I.A. set up a competition, later taken over by the D.N.I., called the Galileo Awards: any employee at any intelligence agency could submit an essay describing a new idea to improve information sharing, and the best ones would win a prize. The first essay selected was by Calvin Andrus, chief technology officer of the Center for Mission Innovation at the C.I.A. In his essay, ?The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,? Andrus posed a deceptively simple question: How did the Internet become so useful in helping people find information? Andrus argued that the real power of the Internet comes from the boom in self-publishing: everyday people surging online to impart their thoughts and views. He was particularly intrigued by Wikipedia, the ?reader-authored? encyclopedia, where anyone can edit an entry or create a new one without seeking permission from Wikipedia?s owners. This open-door policy, as Andrus noted, allows Wikipedia to cover new subjects quickly. The day of the London terrorist bombings, Andrus visited Wikipedia and noticed that barely minutes after the attacks, someone had posted a page describing them. Over the next hour, other contributors ? some physically in London, with access to on-the-spot details ? began adding more information and correcting inaccurate news reports. ?You could just sit there and hit refresh, refresh, refresh, and get a sort of ticker-tape experience,? Andrus told me. What most impressed Andrus was Wikipedia?s self-governing nature. No central editor decreed what subjects would be covered. Individuals simply wrote pages on subjects that interested them ? and then like-minded readers would add new facts or fix errors. Blogs, Andrus noted, had the same effect: they leveraged the wisdom of the crowd. When a blogger finds an interesting tidbit of news, he posts a link to it, along with a bit of commentary. Then other bloggers find that link and, if they agree it?s an interesting news item, post their own links pointing to it. This produces a cascade effect. Whatever the first blogger pointed toward can quickly amass so many links pointing in its direction that it rockets to worldwide notoriety in a matter of hours. Spies, Andrus theorized, could take advantage of these rapid, self-organizing effects. If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink ? linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important ? then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst?s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought. Clearly there are downsides as well, and Thompson discusses most of them in the story.