This Clive Davis is not to be confused with the U.S. music company executive of the same name. He's a former Hoover Institution media fellow, blogger and writer of op-eds for The Times Of London and The Washington Times. What I like about his column in today's Sunday Times is the measured way in which: 1) he gauges the significance of the emerging blogosphere vis a vis the mainstream media; 2) he explores the accomplishments and hubris of conservative bloggers. It's called, "I Have Seen The Future, And It Blogs."

One reason for me starting my own blog just over a year ago (apart from being an incurable know-it-all) was the desire to explore a form that is fresh and unpredictable and not — yet — the property of an incestuous metropolitan elite. Some of the more quixotic spirits even talk about usurping the MSM (ed.-mainstream media) altogether. That may be a daydream, but there’s no question that the balance of power has begun to shift.

But dangers lie in wait too, as anyone knows who has dipped into the new media. As ever, America has lessons for the rest of us. When the Democratic Party puts its destiny in the hands of the hyperventilating devotees of the left-wing site The Daily Kos, it wins short-term gains on the fund-raising trail but scares off centrist voters.

The right-wing blogosphere may not seem quite so vulnerable, but it too faces dangers. There is a lot to be said for the forensic work it has performed in the past couple of years. Faced with a complacent liberal media, it has prompted an overdue rethink among editors and reporters who once assumed that their worldview was the only one that mattered. It would be a shame if the conservative upstarts were to fall into the same trap. It is one thing to say that the mainstream media have got certain stories wrong, quite another to insist that they always get them wrong. But that is the impression that sometimes lingers in the ether.

Precisely right. MSM are a crucial resource, although beyond bias reduction, they need to form stronger alliances with blogs, and learn how to blog properly themselves (a few MSM scribes do get that). But even now, along with the attendant dribble and blather and bias and omission, MSM still provide plenty of meaty stuff to feed the beast that is the blogosphere.

Davis isn't quite done telling conservative bloggers how they're getting it wrong, and right.

...since conventional wisdom on the blogger Right insists that Europe is economically and demographically doomed, the idea that radical Islam is somehow just years away from seizing power becomes even more seductive. A similarly reductionist approach has tinged some of the coverage of the Mohammed cartoons affair. Hostility to Islamism risks degenerating into casual disdain for Muslims as whole.

....Ultimately, however, I remain optimistic. For one thing, conservative bloggers still tend to be more tolerant of dissent than their left-wing counterparts, many of whom are about as much fun as superannuated members of the Militant Tendency. More importantly, if American bloggers often take a superficial view of Europe (we all sit on street corners begging, apparently) Europeans must take some of the blame. There simply aren’t enough of us out there working the internet. For some reason, the habit still hasn’t fully taken root on this side of the pond. Which means that, unless we rise to the challenge, the stereotypes will only get worse. Pardon my franglais, but the time has come to say “Aux keyboards, citoyens!”

All of which gets me thinking about Web-based translation tools, so that international blog conversations can really flourish. With a hat tip to jonnybaker, here's a start. Maybe all bloggers interested in inter-lingual dialog should have a prominently-marked sidebar section titled "To Translate," and then right below, a link to Google Language, where you can enter the URL of a Web page or specific blog post, and have it translated to/from English, to/from French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. Here's a translation of my blog's main page into French, via Google Language. I noticed the translation only covered the first few posts visible on my main page, then it relapsed into English. Although, I'm still chuckling about the re-purposing of "the speeding white sausage" in this post to "la saucisse blanche expediante."

At any rate, Google Language is a good start, but they'll need to get Russian, Eastern European languages, Hebrew, and especially Arabic into the mix. Not to mention Farsi, Filipino, Malay, Urdu, and other languages of the sub-continent.

Let me know about any other worthwhile Web-text translation tools.

TECHNORATI TAGS: CLIVE DAVIS, BLOGS, BLOGOSPHERE, BLOG TRANSLATION, MSM, GOOGLE LANGUAGE

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at February 12, 2006 09:36 PM

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