Quote of the week

Atrios aka Duncan Black has perhaps the ugliest looking blog in the world. The colors are bad, the fonts are bad, the layout is bad--no pictures, no graphics, nothing to please the eye. Seriously, would it kill the dude to bring in a high school intern for an afternoon to spruce the place up a bit?

Oh but the content! There's a reason why he has millions of readers and is one of the most influential political bloggers in the world. Good content, thoughtful content, breaking stories several times a day paired with brilliant analysis. The guy is like a Jedi meme surfer who is always ahead of the next break.

So with that, I bring you the quote of the week, courtesy of Atrios, (hat tip to Kos).

One thing you learn very quickly when you blog is that no matter how smart and knowledgeable you are (or imagine yourself to be), some of your readers are going to be smarter than you and literally every one of your readers knows more than you do about something. It's humbling at first, but then quite liberating. The "shut the hell up I know best" stuff is what grates me the most about politicians and other elites in our system because the truth is that quite often... they don't.

That is exactly what old-school folks don't get about the progressive blogosphere (and apparently it's what Senator Obama doesn't understand about the internet as well). There is always someone smarter out there. And a properly structured group can focus the wisdom of the crowd in ways that make it smarter than even the most informed expert (as Daily Kos, Americablog, and FDL all demonstrate).