The beauty of the Internet is getting to say exactly what you want in a public forum, right?(Well that and stalking ex-boyfriends and shopping at work, but I digress.) The ability to speak one's mind in bytes and blips has
landed one blogger with a jail sentence for extremism. A Russian man who called the local police “scum” and calling for the clean-up of the force he blogged that the police should be burned in the town square twice a day. For this posting, was convicted of “inciting hatred or enmity” and given a one-year suspended sentence.
In a stellar hybrid of New York magazine's Approval Matrix and the fascinating
Political Compass, this week's fun tidbit from Vanity Fair shows the big blogs
on a spectrum from news to opinion and scurrilous to earnest. Who doesn't want to see where
Politico stacks up against
Radar, and
Michelle Malkin against
FireDogLake?
With rollover pics popping up fairly pointed descriptions of the blogs, it does
fairly point out that the Huffington Post is shamelessly pro-Obama and that Drudge has an unfailing reach with his Republican-friendly headlines and ugly step-sister graphics.
I guess it's true: We really are
person of the year. This morning, while covering the devastation caused by the tornadoes that ripped through the mid-south, CNN relied on reporting from some very personal sources: Facebook and blogs. Using pictures of upturned cars posted on local Facebook pages and
reading a posting from the blog Sassy Southerner to report the story, CNN pulled together a very eyewitness account, using no formal reportage.
