WALLACE opens his book with a bit of Internet history, crediting Matt Drudge (The Drudge Report) with the birth of the blog for breaking the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal that Newsweek had opted to kill. This incident set the precedent, Wallace says, for the no-holds-barred “news” blogs of today—many of which are vanity projects and most of which are not edited for accuracy.
Half text-book, half-personal memoir of how bloggers almost killed his own political career (he’s a former Sugarland mayor), Wallace’s book examines how blogs kept Martha Stewart’s image on life support during her incarceration and speculates about what might have happened if blogging were around during the American Revolution. Wallace also advances a blogger’s code of ethics—a nod to the fact that the blogosphere, though pesky at times to powerful people, is here to stay.