In the foreword of BLOGWARS I listed some reasons why there are limitations to the book form being used to talk about blogs. Here are a few:

1. We are in the childhood of online communication and the infancy of the medium, genre of literature, and technology that is the blog. Even for technology experts the course of development and utility of any new invention is hard to predict. Thomas Edison thought his sound recording and playing machine would find its market largely among businessmen dictating letters to their secretaries; he could not foresee the medium he created being used by Edward R. Murrow to describe the bombing of London, the Beatles to play "Love Me Do" for millions of fans, or Osama bin Laden to tape threats to destroy America.

2. A book is linear; blogs are non-linear. Writing about the blog from outside of a blog is analogous to Leonardo da Vinci's distinction between looking at a painting and reading a book: We read the words of a text one at a time, linearly, but a picture offers itself to us "all at once." It is hard to describe the world of blogs and politics step-by-step because all of their elements are so intimately related, so non-linear. (Ideally you should read a blog book with an online computer nearby.)

3. A book on blogs must serve multiple audiences. Although millions of intense bloggers know details of the experience intimately, many studies show that substantial portions of the population have no idea what blogging is or have a number of negative or puerile stereotypes of it. A Gallup poll in March 2005, showed "fewer than one in six Americans (15%) read blogs regularly." So a book about blogs is handicapped in that some of the information may seem tendentious, trite, and self-evident to the cognoscenti, while other musings may confuse naïve readers by sounding too much like insider jargon.

4. Describing political blogging in a book that takes a year to research and write and another to publish is like giving NASCAR commentary via stone tablets. Snapshots of the big picture of blogs will be dated by the time you read this book. But that is the point: A blogger's work is never done. You post an item, but you cannot then triumphantly declare your mission completed as you could with a printed book or an academic journal article. Your blog readership, if you have one, expects you to return again and again to old issues or to move on to new ones. You cannot coast or rest on your laurels; your readers will abandon you or, worse, ask why you are failing them.

I ended up saying that Blogwars is my first extended post in what I hope will be a long thread of conversation, a speculation about a fast-moving phenomenon whose direction, development, and destinations are unknown and probably unknowable. But I claim that one fact is certain: Blogs have and will change our politics and our world, even if, at this point, we have only the dimmest visions of things to come. The future is unwritten, but it will not be unblogged!