New heavy-hitter group blog now online
More proof that the blogosphere is the world's repository of expertise

The Counterterrorism Blog is only five days old, but it will be an Ecosystem top 50 blog within 60 days, I'm betting.

CT Blog is a group effort with 11 top-drawer experts. Consider three, picked at random (these paras lifted from Diplomad):

Dennis Lormel, who founded and directed the FBI's Terrorist Financing Operations Section, and is now Senior VP for Anti-Money Laundering at Corporate Risk International.

Lee Wolosky [of] Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. He is also an Adjunct Professor in International Affairs at Columbia University. Mr. Wolosky joined the firm in 2001 from the White House, where he served as Director for Transnational Threats on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush.

Matthew Levitt, Director of the Terrorism Studies Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former FBI counterterrorism analyst, with a special focus on fundraising and logistical support networks for Middle East terrorist groups.

It already shapes up as a "must-read." I also think that this blog (with Powerline as a precursor) is proof of the mainlining of blogging as the new mass media. Before blogging gained its still-congealing reputation as reliable media for disseminating breaking news and issues essays, the men and woman writing this blog would have been frozen out of offering their collaborative efforts and wisdom. There was no medium all of them could have realistically used together. Perhaps a book, but from idea to publication is pretty much a two-year project, many months too long for timeliness, of course.

And that brings up another advantage of blogging technology. Samuel Johnson said that "he who writes for other than money is a fool." Considering the effort and expense and uncertainty of being published conventionally, he was right. Writing for pre-pixel media wasn't attractive except in hope of financial reward.

Yet almost anyone can blog and be published. I know that being published isn't the same as being read (widely read, anyway), but that's true for much article and book writing, too. Yet cream rises to the top in any endeavor. To disseminate your work quickly (heck, immediately) for mass audiences, nothing can touch a blog short of owning a national radio or TV show.

If you have something to say - and CT Blog's writers definitely will - then blog you must. A lot of highly-credentialed, accomplished men and women figured this fact out in the last three years or so. Many of them are listed on my blogroll in the left column. I think that more and more such folks will come to realize this, and the blogosphere will be immeasurably enriched by it.

Already the blogosphere is an expertise repository. It shall become more so at an accelerating pace.

by Donald Sensing, 1/10/2005 10:11:26 PM. Permalink |