Alright, so long as people are actually linking to the Wall Street Journal article on DC's new blogging elite, I should probably explain what I meant by the term. My point, which got a bit lost, is that it's a bad thing. I talk, later in the piece, about how blogging has had a positive impact on journalism, making things a bit more meritocratic rather than a mere Ivy League cabal. The problem, I then said, was that the social network could become just another set of elites -- a "new blogging elite," if you will -- where success was determined, in part, by the same old cocktail of connections, social ties, friendships, etc. That would substantially harm the medium's capacity for enhancing meritocracy.
In part, that's already happening. The hope is that it's counterbalanced by many of these relationship being borne from professional -- or inter-blog -- respect, rather than being preexisting relationships, so it's at least got a meritocractic element at the outset. I knew Matt Yglesias, for instance, as a writer for years before we ever met. On the other hand, I knew Brian Beutler long before he ever had a blog, but my first exposure to him was still as a writer. In any case, my point wasn't that this development was cool and we're all awesome, just that it was happening.
And it's true, Yglesias totally is a ringleader.
