Bruce Bartlett at National Review Online:
The point I am getting at is that blogging is finally maturing into a useful way for people to interact with each other to sort out differences. It’s like being in a seminar room with some of the smartest people on the planet, where we are all searching for answers to the same questions, but coming at them with very different experiences and philosophical perspectives.
But it is really better than that — because in a seminar room only one person can speak at a time, some people speak too long, others go off on tangents, while others effectively sabotage any effort to narrow differences by focusing only on those areas where agreement is impossible. With a blog discussion, these problems go away. There are no time constraints, people must write their comments, those that are off-topic can be skipped over, and those who abuse the forum can have their comments deleted by the host.
Also, in a seminar room people can sometimes get away with making outrageous claims or factual errors that cannot be responded to in that forum. In a blog discussion, no one can get away with such things. Fact-checkers will immediately swoop down on mistakes and often provide hyperlinks to original sources that can be checked by anyone for verification. The result is an automatic self-correction mechanism that helps keep everyone honest.
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