medievalist – thanks for the kind words.

Russell – won’t be posting the lecture (I tend to extemporize a bit). The ideas will be seeing publication eventually in a book that Dan Drezner and I hope to write sooner or later (I’m stealing the title of the talk from this project).

Seth – my rough take is that blogs played a significant role in Trent Lott’s resignation, a quite marginal role in the Rather affair (maybe accelerated the process a bit – but the program would have gotten hammered anyway) and a quite significant role in the Jordan Eason resignation (which itself was not at all important as a political event). But it’s hard to make hard claims on any of these – as it’s tricky to figure out the counterfactuals.

Since I discovered LGF, I’ve starting having serious doubts about universal suffrage.

Others are simply one blogger talking to another…or commenting on the latest article or issue. The posters are quite irrelevant, at best a dummied-down Greek Chorus. And even if the posters do raise issues or problems, they, the posters, are simply dismissed as irrelevant to the little idea wars being waged.

The last tends to be an imitation of the sterile kind of chatter that occurs in academic journals—sides chosen, battle lines drawn…each side does its own circle jerk.

I would suggest that the oildrum is a blog that works. Most, if not all, economic blogs fall into the latter category.

From outside of the chattering classes, these are tiny, tiny shifts. Now, they are real shifts, and will be of intense interest to professional chatters. But it’s like shake-ups at the executive level of a big corporation. The top-level people and the management climbers care. It doesn’t change anything for anyone else, except in very marginal ways.

This should be a short lecture, because as far as I see, blogs do not change politics one bit.