"The Paper of Record" is hardly the one place to get the gospel on anything, but when 4 NYT articles in 24 hours talk about customers, fans, and online contributors driving the direction of not just web sites, but franchises and products, then I'm comfortable saying leadership via consumer collaboration is on the radar in a new way.

Katie Hafner's article on gating access to some Wikipedia entries highlights the need for some level of process and hierarchy even in an open community. The inevitable need to close a small number of entries some of the time echoes my favorite PDF article ever, when Zephyr called for a "productive tension" between the hub of a campaign and its spokes.

Per Micah's post about Hastert blog, I noticed today that neither the Reid site nor the Frist site had a firsthand update or even a statement about the secret session.

Too bad. Great opportunity to give the flavor and push your message. Though I guess it'd be a little less secret. Still, a post from a PDA from a Senator in the secret session that didn't technically reveal any secrets would be pretty cool.

The Karl Rove kontroversy is not blog-born or blog-driven, but I think Farhad Manjoo's Salon article shows the influence of instapunditry.

The article lays out the story so far in a relatively straight-ahead way, but then it handicaps possible outcomes in a rhetorical Q&A addressing the questions an impatient, outcome-hungry audience might have. That's the audience fueling the instant-news engine of the blogosphere.

Technology also plays a more direct role in the unfolding (unraveling?) Rove story, with an email between Matt Cooper and his TIME bureau chief appearing to document Rove's outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative -- though he didn't utter her name, he and his lawyer hasten to add in a jarringly Clintonian disclaimer.

(The Newseek story goes on to mention parenthetically that "(Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.))" A story doesn't need to unfold via blogs for blogs and blog culture to influence how it unfolds.

At the Monday keynote of SXSW Interactive, Texas Monthly's Evan Smith is interviewing Wonkette, who I'm going to call Ana Marie Cox from now on.

About 20 minutes in, Smith asked if bloggers are journalists. "If we're going to include people like Maureen Dowd as journalists," Cox answered, "then why not bloggers? ... However you want to define journalism, it's independent of what medium you're working in."

But then she surprised me a little. In a bid for the distinction between the two, and for the track record of journalism as we've known it up until now, she said there was a lot to be learned from "the hard work of getting a story right."

Good blogging isn't just "opening up a vein" on the page, she continued. "Most people aren't that interesting on a first draft."

Her extremely instructive (and responsible, I think) hedge is to advise bloggers to "have the mentality of a writer ...

In Austin at SXSW, for a panel tomorrow on deliberative democracy and technology.

Yesterday, heard Jeffrey Veen make a great point on how technology can fuel post-conference follow-up. Blogs, he suggested, may be a better way to keep the conversation going than the traditional "Hey, let's start a listserv" exhortations (which, as we all know, work about as often as friendships after summer camp).

A networked (scattered?) collection of blog posts may have more penetration, more authenticity and maybe even more long-term effectiveness than listservs among a self-selected minority who start with good intentions but often lack the time - and even more often the project - to focus their work.

Today, on the Blogging While Black panel, the discussion has the momentum and vitality of something still rare and excited to recognize itself. Lynne Johnson is moderating with a highly-structured but really productive list of questions.

According to NYT, Governor Arnold, Common Cause and hundreds of other groups are turning an activist's eye to the issue of redistricting and how it entrenches incumbents and, presumably, disenfranchises blocs and even blocks.

For Inauguration week, Rich Harwood has invited several guests to his Redeeming Hope blog to talk about the Red/Blue division and "the next chapter of America’s story."

Rich has written and spoken extensively about the Red/Blue issue, including a June article in The Monitor.

Guests for the blog event include Meetup's Scott Heiferman and Peter Levine from CIRCLE, among others.

Media research company Bacon's Information says it will be watching "the most reputable online news blogs" in order to help their subscribers "determine the possible impact on business decisions and company reputations."

The Bizwire announcement doesn't specify quite how they'll decide who's reputable. But clearly this is a sign that the race is on--not to decide who's reputable, but to decide who will decide, and how.

Can the blogosphere withstand reputation brokers, or are decentralized, emergent systems of trust the only ones truly safe from Blairs, Murdochs and more innocent forms of group-think and false report?

Privacy isn't always a matter of unprotected data or unconstitutional seizures.

The A.C.L.U. is facing new scrutiny for compiling public data about its donors' affiliations. Is there a penumbra of privacy around the lives we live publically, but somewhat facelessly?

In a December article about "dating blogs," author and constitutional scholar Jeff Rosen talks about the growing need for "new social conventions to resurrect the boundaries between public and private interactions."

As technology makes the traces our actions more visible, a new category of data is emerging: the "ripples" we leave behind.

Is this information fair game? Like the stories ex-girlfriends tell about contestants on reality TV shows?

Or do we need new "quarantine"-style rules around who can collect our ripples, and what they can do with them?

Initial response from the A.C.L.U.

Mark Glaser of OJR keeps a steady eye on the encounter between journalism and the Internet. In today's article he uses the lovely coinage "town blog" to describe a wave of new "hyperlocal" citizen media sites.