Down in the basement, where most bloggers do their best work...

This site is now unofficially four years old...on February 19, 2005, the HORROR-REPORT began on a geocities site...in May four years ago, the domain was purchased...soon I will choose to stop this site or continue for the fifth year...

Just got around to reading this Peggy Noonan article from the Wall Street JOURNAL...the beautiful and bright Noonan has truly inspired me to continue the HORROR-REPORT.COM with her article on bloggers, and how they are setting the course in the dark sea of information...how their light is a watchtower for all others...

There are more blogs than we know of...more being created every day. More than we can keep track of...girls in high school blogging which boys they like...college kids blogging about sex...others blogging about Bush, news, war...peace. But all spreading information. We are saturated like the ground in early spring...

But from that saturation we breathe and live. We seek information, and chances are, someone in this small world blogged about it.

I enjoyed how Noonan continued to mock the journalistic skills of others who may jump at the chance to impune bloggers for their "attacks"...But as she writes, where did they go to school??? What truly makes them better?
We were faced this past week with the scandal of Jeff Gannon, James Guckert..I know, he told Anderson cooper than "Jeff" is easier to say than "James," but that's beside the point...

What comes from this Gannon experience---one that's not over---is that fact that bloggers hunted him and exposed him for the fraud he was...not how big of a deal it turns out will be another thing, but it was the blogs that point it on the radar screen...same with the CNN exec...same with Trent Lott...same with a lot..

And same with Monica Lewisnky, when a little known Hollywood gossip reporter named Matt Drudge shocked the world by reporting that NEWSWEEK spiked a story that the President with involved with a long term sexual affair with an intern...World rocked and never stopped moving...

And it wasn't just in times of scandal that they prevailed...In the Ukraine this year we saw a glimpse of an election, same in Iraq, where bloggers blogged their dreams a month ago...we saw that in a tsunami ravaged country, we can turn to online reporters who shared information, data charts, passed photos from AP news, and talked. And talked. And typed. We felt better after seeing so much information because we weren't getting it from the news...12 hours-------12 hours-------while the tsnumai gathered speed and strength, no cable news or network news outlet was reporting on that horror and devestation...However on the net, sirens were ringing, literally. Drudge's siren went up...blogs fired up..."Something in happening in the sea" one wrote. It was. A 10 magnitude quake hits and no cable news network reports...But those "gossip-mongering" bloggers saved the day...for 12 hours they reported on information coming fast and furious while Dan Rather slept...

And finally, I also liked how Noonan wrote her final paragrpah: "Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of the country are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they're going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it's there, most heartening information from . . . some lone blogger out there. And then another. They're going to do some big work down the road."

I only hope that this little site, the HORROR-REPORT, can be a part of something...not for fame or fortune, I have neither, but for the passage of humanity from one generation to another. This site was here, archived forever...the same way we look at 19th and early 20th century front pages of the NY TIMES is how we will view archived screen caps of sites for decades to come...


BRYAN SMOLOCK THE HORROR-REPORT SATURDAY FEBRUARY 19 2005 7:20 PM EDT

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