While everyone is keeping so busy bitching about the ethics, transparency, and disclosure of blogs (give me a damn break already.. credibility for bloggers? That's like asking for credibility in rock-n-roll or hip-hop. But I digress.), I ran across this piece from Jack Shafer of Slate. It's sub-titled, "The danger of hyping a good thing into the ground." It's about Blog Overkill.

Well, I've got news for all you disclosure weenies. I disclose that I agree with a good deal of what Shafer writes.

The HELL you say? Yeah, I know, it's blasphemous, especially when you consider all that I do.

First, I'm finding that I'm using the word blog less in my spoken vocabulary. Why? Because I'm spending more time writing. And while I am responsible for Audioblog.com, am an active podcaster AND videoblogger, I know that the only true strength comes from triple mastery of all of these media.

Aside from playing around in a few tempermental piss matches about how audio is so stupid because you can't index/skim/scan/smell it like text, keep a simple reminder in the back of your mind that I publish in ALL three forms of media, and I'm doing so intentionally.

It's my job and my mission in life to evangelize these things. I don't believe that these things will disrupt the Institutions into oblivion. In fact, these things will do the opposite. They'll contribute. They'll make the variety bigger. Traditionals will get ideas from the Contemporaries and vice versa.

(I'm reminded of that fact every time a blogger points to a mainstream media news article. Oh the irony!)

And so begins the hype of playing both sides against the middle. Getting an idealist who knows how to play the big game is dangerous and productive all at the same time.

I agree that we shouldn't kid ourselves about saving the world by what we're doing. We're enhancing the world (that's the theory anyway) with the content we produce with new technologies.

Just check how the grass looks on the other side. Give an independent publisher, a citizen journalist, or a hot headed opinionist a fraction of the dollars it takes to run a Baghdad news bureau, and I'd be willing to bet some amazing things can happen. It's about resources.

And Big Medias who want to criticize people at home in pajamas can do so---understanding that people at home in pajamas armed with modems have plenty of flexibility and free time... to share ideas, to dream, to create, to uncover truths, or simply to hide, to plot, or to destroy.

It's all how you look at it.