Jon, this is the key idea -- and this is why you should be on your toes, listening carefully, because the tech press is gone now. It's been routed around. The people do it for themselves now. The reason? Too many lies, for too long. The people know they're being lied to, as I knew they were lying about the dearth of Mac software. Why shrug your shoulders and give up as if there were nothing to do about it? If you don't like the news, now you can do it yourself.

I don't know if this is going to be true for political reporting as well, but I suspect that it will be. A democratic society needs the kind of reports and debates that can happen on blogs. It's not clear to me that this is happening. I got bit by a phony story attributed to CNN during the war. For blog political reporting, we're going to need a good reputation system, and bloggers are going to have to police the facts themselves. There's a bit more at stake in reporting on the political process. It's going to be interesting to see how it turns out.