How to justify blogging

I've heard about 100 different opinions about blogs/bloggers. My thinking at first was... how pretentious! What would make a person think that if I don't have time to get a Wall Street Journal or NY Times in my day that I would somehow find time to follow their meandering views on the world? I mean, if they were that good, wouldn't they be writing for the big names already?

Fine. We're nobody. But collectively, we are a force of boom-pow proportions. Consider this; two or three people have major editorial power over a given large press. In all the history of mankind, what has happened when a few people at the top got to filter the information that everybody on the bottom was able to see? This is a cross-spectrum phenom. Consider politics. Police forces. Hospital administration. Government contracting offices. Oooh, the sweet, sweet smells of bribery and loot to the people at the position of gatekeeper. Whose honor endures?

You, me, the whole lot of bloggers and posters and commenters e-wide have snatched that power mercilessly out of their hands, now, haven't we? Mmmm. Closing my eyes for a second... That does something for my soul. Right now, I'm Anthony Hopkins, sniffing Clarice through the holes in the re-enforced Plexiglas. The common man--the nobody (me)--can now shake a story or view like a tree in the back yard of a safe-house and see what manner of booty falls out.

I don't have one of those three crooks over my head right now. He can't say, "We're working that pro-religion angle on this one, Kierstead, so sully the atheist protesters," to which I would respond, "What? Why?" to which he would respond, "Came from the top, I don't know," to which I would respond, "Lick my waddle, monkey man, I'm out." Well, I am out. I'm over here, where the money isn't pushing the message. I'm over here where my beliefs of what's good and bad, valuable and true, where my angles are motivated by my soul which I like to believe is fairly representative of the average person's.

Oh, we have power. We are justified.

I can't tell you how many of my friends insist on getting their news from the BBC. Is it any wonder?

Isn't it possible, though, that maybe I'm just constructing a comfortable blanket of supposition so that I don't feel like I'm a self-absorbed asshole who actually believes people give a jolly damn what I write? No. No, that's not Kev. (I mean, look what I just wrote; the thought of it threw me into the third-person... all kinds of crooked).

Maybe everybody has a price. Would I write that angle (pro or anti-whatever) if it fed my family? How could I say no to that? (I'd quit, actually, and go work somewhere else, but how can you blame a person?)

The larger the sample size, the more accurate the survey.

Do blog. Over-run the gatekeepers and let us all in!