All These Things You Saw in Your Pyjamas

 
Gates of Vienna, along with hundreds of other blogs, has signed up for the fledgling enterprise known as Pajamas Media. Something new is just getting started, and no one knows quite how it will turn out. We PJ people have the privilege of helping to define a new structure, of which, in five or ten or twenty years, PJMedia people will say, “This is the way we’ve always done it.”

As Dymphna said yesterday,

Don’t you just love the blogosphere? There you are, frustrated with the way things are going, realizing a letter to your congressman is a puny waste of time, yet feeling too old and encumbered to climb aboard a camel and head out to right the wrongs you can see so clearly.

Then you go out and find the resources that help, and add your voice to the enormous conversation.

The conversation, as John Hinderaker says, goes on among a self-selected group of intelligent people:

I’ve often asked myself what makes the blogosphere worthwhile. Certainly a big part of the answer is that the world is full of smart people, a large majority of whom didn’t go to journalism school and don’t work for newspapers or magazines. One of the basic things blogs do is give those people a voice.

This group of people tends to be center-right in political orientation, because these opinions are the ones systematically excluded from Big Media and the academy. But we are hardly monolithic in our orientation. In a conversation that includes Gates of Vienna, Powerline, Roger Simon, Glenn Reynolds, Wretchard, and Florida Cracker, the overlap of opinions will probably be less than 40%. Yet I know that nothing I say will be dismissed; I will be listened to with respect, disagreed with vigorously, and held to a high standard of accuracy.

This is something I never even dreamed of five years ago. There was not a prayer that anything Dymphna or I said would ever make its way into a public forum and be taken seriously, even to be refuted. What we and others like us have to say was simply excluded from the conversation.

But that has now changed. The growth of contrary opinions was too strong and widespread to be stopped; it has now found its fertile ground, and is ready to burgeon and bear fruit.

What’s the long-range forecast for our farmers?