Aldon Hynes is going to blog the Libby trial and posts about what value bloggers can bring to such events. He’s not a lawyer, but he also doesn’t want “end up at the other end of the spectrum talking about which outfit which witness wore…” He says that he expects to be writing about the “underlying narrative” and “the impalpable essence of the courtroom atmosphere…”

Could well be. But I suspect what Aldon is going to write about is and should be essentially unpredictable. He’s going to find interesting things to blog, but they are going to be precisely that which he and we can’t anticipate. That unpredictability is a big part of the value of having bloggers at large. We don’t know what bloggers are going to say because we don’t know what will happen and we don’t know what it will mean to them. Hmm, a lot like life! That’s exactly why we want intelligent, committed people like Aldon blogging at events of shared significance.

If that’s citizen journalism, it doesn’t have that much in common with journalism except that both have public events as their topic—just as restaurant reviews, menus, and health inspector reports all may be about the same establishment. What Aldon will blog is not reportage—in fact, it assumes good reporting is being done—but it’s also not mere opinion or editorial.It is perspective. It is how the world looks to this person, and it is how that person looks in the world.

Blogging is the great make-sense-of, and we get to do together. [Tags: blogging journalism citizen_journalism libby aldon_hynes everything_is_miscellaneous ]