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No insight in Perlmutter's 'Blogwars'

By David L. Beck, Special to the Times
In print: Sunday, April 6, 2008

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The St. Petersburg Times ran a recent piece by Nancy Nall Derringer detailing, in a quarter of a page, how a blog posting that took her a minute to research and an hour to write brought down a key White House aide who was in the habit of plagiarizing everyone from obscure academics to Pope John Paul II.

The column about her odd and unexpected triumph ran on Slate, the online magazine, on March 3. It is a model of clarity and concision, and it tells you most of what you need to know about the potential power of blogs in the era of instant politics.

You can read it at life.tampabay.com for free; or you can spend 25 bucks for David Perlmutter's book on the same subject. In more than 250 poorly written pages, Perlmutter manages to say little if anything more than Derringer has in about a thousand well-chosen words. Of course, Derringer is a writer; Perlmutter, alas, is a journalism professor.

His book is ill-organized, unclear, lacking in insight and wretchedly composed: He throws around words such as "mediafit" and "selfcasting" as though they were English, uses prepositions interchangeably and has not bothered to set his graduate students, or "wisebots," to fact-checking.

A blog, short for Web log, can be anything from the random scribblings of a teenage romantic to the thoughtful commentary of a political enthusiast.

Blogs are easy to create, easy to comment on, easy to link to other blogs and Web sites. And as they are instant, they have the ability to replicate actual conversation. Politicians, beginning most publicly with Howard Dean in 2004, are inevitably drawn to them. None of this is likely to be new information to anyone choosing to read about blogs. A book about their political and social implications would be useful, if it were written thoughtfully and clearly, and if the author had any imagination. But this is not that book.

David L. Beck is a reporter, editor and critic. He lives in St. Petersburg.