Some Thoughts On Hugh Hewitt’s Book, “Blog”

I finally got around to completing Hugh Hewitt’s book, “Blog”. I can’t say that I recommend this book for people looking to understand business blogging or blogging at a practitioner-level. That said, Hugh does a very nice job of both highlighting the legitimization of the blog in the context of specific political events and detailing specific blog and mainstream media events around the “fall” of Senator Trent Lott, stumblings of presidential candidate John Kerry, and flurry surrounding the Dan Rather/CBS/Bush National Guard forged documents.

A couple of interesting things the book touches on:

1. Hugh draws a very interesting analogy between the invention of movable type printing press and the reformation surrounding the Catholic church and distribution of the Bible. Note that movable typesetting brought down the cost of books more than 400 times, thus enabling knowledge to be dispersed through sub-communities very rapidly. Aside from Hugh's book, I find it interesting to think about the name of Six Apart’s non-hosted blogging software, “Movable Type” and the how cost of content management software, traditionally thought of as enterprise software, has come down (arguably tens to hundreds of times, where some of the mid-range content management products are in the tens of thousands of dollars range versus blogging at hundreds of dollars [clearly not comparing apples to apples though]).
2. Using the uber reach of Hugh Hewitt, Hugh writes something to the effect of how he plans to highlight the blogs of up-and-coming and young Republican bloggers to ensure that the next generation of Republicans to defeat the Democrats is in place. He highlights the talent gap on the side of the Democrats, especially given that most of the uber political blogs are all Republican. Interesting tactics to say the least given the Democrat lean of mainstream media, and the recent announcement of Fox News to supporting blogging.

To be frank, I don’t follow political blogs that closely, and I haven’t followed the rise of talk radio. Perhaps as a consequence, I don’t follow Hugh Hewitt that closely. I am not sure if Hugh is center right or far right. He characterizes himself as center right. That said, some of the accounts in his book strike me as a bit one-sided. Perhaps not nauseating one-sideness like Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but you may need to look past some of Hugh’s zeal to get through this book if you are not a Republican.

Comments

[jim wilde]

Hi,

You're so right about the cost of content management systems coming down. We use open source software products to provide CMS, and Knowledge Management services to business. In most cases, much less than what current enterprise packages cost. What's more, new services like del.icio.us , and things like blogs and wikis that are standard in our service - Ideascape - give new meaning to the discovery of knowledge; hence, innovation.