The NYTimes may dress it up, pretend it’s news on the front page while they editorialize, but in the end, they are attempting to elect more folks who think like them.

It’s a waste of my time.

But to the actual question, bloggers in general are more intelligent than the reporters at the time or the columnists at those sites. They have experience in the real world and bring common sense to their opinions. Powerline is a great example, how the NYTimes journalism degreed people are going to argue legal decisions with them is ridiculous. At best they can only parrot what someone else has told them.

You see their lack of depth in almost every issue they tackle. Only when they go into an in-depth multi-page analysis do they come close to the expertise that many bloggers bring to the table.

Relative ***strength*** shown here ,,when compared to each teams 2004/2005 season .. and I also am doing a PAR = H/A for each division

this is the # of points each home game in nba was decided by

The number of home games won by home team by:
1 pt = 27
2. = 36
3. = 43
4. = 38
5. = 36
6. = 40
7. = 37
8. = 53
9. =45
>=10. = 357

The number of games won by the visiting team by:
1 pt = 26
2. =41
3. =35
4. =33
5. =33
6. =43
7. =31
8. =22
9. =36
>=10. =168

However, something probably has to be different at the NYT in the future (vs. the past) before investing in the NYT:
http://simurl.com/robbig

“the Times isn’t infallible. But it also proves that a mechanism for finding the truth does exist. The vast majority of blogs have no such mechanism.”

Now THERE is a “what was he smoking” comment for you!

Newsflash – this mechanism does exist. In fact, it exists in two places; and I’ve seen it consistently produce results very, very quickly:

[1] Most blogs are a two-way conversation, in that posts have atached comments. You’re in one now. If Mark says something factually incorrect about, say, the P2P industry, there are folks here with expert background knowledge who will call him on it very quickly. Over at my team blog Winds of Change.NET, we value that reader expertise and it does feed abck into our posts – including via annotated corrections.

Heck, some of the comments we get are better than the posts they’re attached to. We’ll highlight those with a link and note at the end of the article. Or make them Guest Blog features and give them the spotlight they’ve earned.

[2] It’s called other bloggers. What makes the blog traffic model work is the dense interconnection of linkage between them. This may come as a shock, but some of those folks tend to disagree. Their counter-arguments link to the stuff they disagree with, however, and often spawn other posts in turn elsewhere in the blogosphere. Meanwhile, people following those links are parachuting into your comments section and offering their two cents.

This structure plus the “Six Degrees” principle means that folks making consequential and widely-read arguments had better have their ducks in order. Because they’re going to be checked out and talked back to by folks who know a lot more about that subject than your average NY Times editor.

Blogs aren’t perfect. Nothing is. Their model, technology, and structure has miles to go before it sleeps the sleep of a mature industry. That’s all true.

What is demonstrably NOT true, is “futureoffilm’s” charge re: the blogosphere’s fact-checking mechanisms.