UK View of US Blogging

Mediations' Philip Young highlighted the "terrifying power of the bloggers" by posting an article from the Guardian this past week written by Paul Carr that describes the UK view of the US blogging craze. The article makes the following observations:

-all over America, young people are using their "computers" to create
"websites" full of information about their daily lives
-major news organisations are rolling out blogs of their own, but in the past 12 months the influence of bloggers over their print, television and radio counterparts has grown massively
-this year's Democratic National Convention (DNC) issued press accreditation to political bloggers
-web journalism has started to influence the mainstream media. Take America's newest radio network, Air America Radio whose hosts are armed to the teeth with hard, up-to-the second facts to support their relentless candidate bashing. Their sources? Blogs. And the blogging bloggers who blog them. The effect of this is to guarantee a large web-savvy audience for the station, an audience for whom it is perfectly natural to visit the shows' official blogs and to comment on what they're hearing, as they're hearing it.
-newscasters are frequently reading out blog feedback as it comes in on air...add to this the fact that bloggers and online journalists from sites such as DailyKos.com and TheMemoryHole.org frequently appear as guests...Air America starts to look like the world's first major blog-powered radio station. But if it is, it certainly won't be the last.
-as the popularity of internet radio continues to grow...it will soon become almost impossible to utter a sentence on the air without it being torn apart by an army of live online critics.
-the author hopes that what they do is follow Air America's lead and choose to work alongside bloggers, rather than against them.
-blogging may be just a craze to some, but to almost everyone
else it's already a terrifyingly powerful influence on what the media say and how they say it.