In class tonight, someone made the type of comment we’ve heard over and over again: Blogs are great because they did X, and without blogs, X wouldn’t have happened. The example this time was the bike lock story that circulated a while back (last summer, maybe?) , and the sentiment was that without the blogs telling everyone how easy some $150 bike lock was to pick with a simple ball point pen, the news wouldn’t have spread. (Whether that’s a good thing or not is up to bikers and would-be bike thieves to figure out.)

But, like we’ve often done in this class, I think we give the blogs too much credit. When the news was spreading, I was by no means even a moderate blog reader, and yet I knew about it. So did my mom, who reads blogs even less than I do. I heard about it from friends who read bike magazines, or I heard about it from CNN, which actually picked up on it pretty quickly. Yeah, some guy figured out how to steal a bike and posted the directions on the Web, but the events that followed were not unique to the dynamic world of the Internet.

I guess this is just yet another reminder, to the people in the class and to the entire world, not to give blogs too much credit for taking part in a campaign or cause that was getting along just fine without them.