Over the Rainbow...

Maybe somewhere... there's a taxonomy of blogs, where they're categorized according to spheres of influence - in terms of variety of media they influence, type of readership (using some more useful rubric than the tired old liberal / conservative division, God, I'm so sick of that one), scale of readership, whether they entertain ideas or just jerk their knees at every story the New York Times runs...

The Stanford Magazine has an interesting article about something called "deliberative polling," which might be a useful way to think about a certain type of blog - one where ideas are hashed out, rather than one where opinions are merely aired. So maybe it would be useful to say that some blogs are "deliberative," some are, let's call them "wacko rants," some are "informational," and so on.