More Credit Than We Deserve

And not for the first time, either. Nevertheless, we appreciate Patrick Ruffini’s kind words in his post titled “Ten Days In September that Shook the Blogosphere”:

The previous thread on red state vs. blue state readership in the blogosphere confirmed a definite trend.
If you had to boil it down, the readership of this blog comes down to two main groups. The first, embattled red staters at heart trapped in the blue citadels of D.C. and San Francisco, started reading blogs in late 2001 and early 2002, with the first surge of interest after September 11th. The second wave hails from red states and counties, places like Georgia, Kentucky, and Florida, who tuned in those critical August and September days around the Republican Convention and Rathergate and never tuned out.
We all knew how significant Rathergate was. What we did not know, perhaps, is that it sparked a major demographic shift in blog readership.
If so, then Scott Johnson and John Hinderaker are not merely noteworthy personalities. They are heroes — the ones who took blogs into the American mainstream and institutionalized the democratization of the media.
I was also surprised to see the Convention mentioned a few times as a galvanizing moment, especially after the pop surrounding the saturation media coverage of blogs at the DNC dissipated almost totally. What must have happened is that the RNC first engaged this new audience, and Rathergate held it and took it to a new level.
The bottom line on blogs and 2004 has to be this: our blogs mattered more when it mattered the most.

I agree with Patrick’s bottom line. As to us, however, I’d probably replace “heroes” with “middle-aged nerds who keep getting lucky.”

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