The Meta-Story

Much of the focus on the whole Rainville story has become more about me and how I uncovered it, and so much of it has been about the power of blogs to influence the mainstream media.

I don't think it should be about any of those things. Here's why:

I'm concerned by the number of people who are impressed by my amazing Google skills. This is not a talent. It's not even a skill. It's just copying some words from text posted on the web, putting them into Google and seeing what happens. Try it yourself. Try it with the phrase "The squares marked A and B are the same shade of gray" and you'll see that I took those exact words from a very cool site about an optical illusion.

This isn't about the blogosphere rising up to get the mainstream media to focus on something. I found this information on Sunday night. I posted it on the blog because it was easiest (and because there's a comments field, in case anyone wanted to respond), but I could just as easily have placed it on any one of my websites. If I'd done this, would anyone be framing it in terms of blogs or the blogosphere?

This wasn't picked up by mainstream media because I posted it on my blog. This was picked up by mainstream media because I sent an e-mail out to everyone I could think of who worked for a paper with which I was familiar, and used the blog as an information archive. Mainstream media was all over the story more quickly than most bloggers, and the one blogger who was on it quickly (Peter Freyne) got the story because he was affiliated with Seven Days, one of the newspapers to which I sent the original story.

Blogs are very important, and I think they've provided some valuable resources, but this particular story is not about blogs, nor is it about me. It's about a candidate with manufactured talking points who only seems to have a surface understanding of the ideas she's using to pretend her independence.