I noted earlier that some weblog aficionados were under the delusion that weblogs were offering serious competition to mainstream news sources like CNN.
A friend and former colleague at CNN tells me that traffic was coming in at about 700,000 hits a minute during the first wave of attacks on Baghdad. That’s about 12,000 hits a second or 1 billion a day. I leave it to the reader to ponder how much bandwidth and server power that requires, but it’s something more than a cable modem and a garden variety consumer PC can answer.
And to add insult to injury, Kevin Sites’ weblog is hardly the talk of CNN Center: my source wasn’t even aware of its existence.
There’s some danger of self-delusion here: if the only news sources you read are weblogs, it’s tempting to assume everyone else does too, and thereby overestimate their importance.
I don’t read weblogs for news: I read them for commentary and perspective, and as a source of new information that balances or amplifies the news I get from more authoritative sources.