Chris Allbritton, a former reporter for the Associated Press, took this empowerment further. From contributions solicited at his weblog, (back-to-iraq.com) he raised over $14,000 to report on the war in Iraq as an independent correspondent, answerable only to his readers and his conscience. Armed with a satellite phone, a global position unit, a laptop, and his reporting skills, Allbritton flew to Turkey, snuck over the border into Northern Iraq, made his way to Baghdad, and started posting live reports to his weblog, which had 23,000 users and supporters during the peak of his reporting (March 27, 2003.) That was an act of journalism--the social practice Carey talked about--that cut out "the media" entirely, proving that one does not depend on the other. (See this about Allbritton's breakthrough.)

That is why I call the weblog the last mile in self-publishing. In cable television, the last mile, stretching from the system to the private home, is the most expensive and politically charged portion of the network. It's where greater media capacity comes down from the skies to plug into people's lives; and it is also the point where public regulation, the economics of television, the politics of municipalities, viewer choice, and a dozen other factors converge. The last mile brought us "public access," but it was under-funded and meant to lose out to the commercial channels people would pay for.

If cable television is the heavy industry of the media age, the weblog is of much lighter invention. In fact, it was hardly noticed at first, beyond a few visionaries who invented the form, and started fooling around with it. Anil Dash is a vice president for Six Apart, a company that makes the popular Movable Type program for webloggers. In a talk he gave at New York University's Law School, (February 20, 2004) Dash said that the weblog was a "boring" development to techies, who took one look and saw nothing original in the code or functioning.

Yet the genius of the weblog was not in any technological leap, but in completing the last mile in the two-way highway the Web has become. The form favors individual voices and self-publishers, most of whom will have no media institution behind them, and no hope of profit. What they are after is free speech and the enhancement of public life. Or as Tim Dunlop puts it, "an environment where ordinary people can use argument to increase their knowledge."

Institutions, too, will speak through weblogs (CEO's for example) as will professional journalists. For now, at least, amateurs, "isolated free-lancers" and random citizens speak in the same public space as these other voices. The equalizing effect can be extreme. Atrios, pen name for the one of the most successful political webloggers, had no background in either journalism or politics when he began. Now his blog claims more than 65,000 visits a day. (For more on Atrios, see this case study about blogs and the fate of Trent Lott from the Kennedy School at Harvard.)