Andrew Sullivan Discusses Blogs on Colbert Report

Posted on January 19, 2006

Blogger Andrew Sullivan, who recently relocated his blog, The Daily Dish to Time.com, appeared on the Colbert Report earlier this week and blogs were one of the issues Sullivan and Stephen Colbert discussed.

Colbert: So edumacate me here: A blog is what? I know the kids do it, I hear it all the time with, like, iPod, I hear those two terms thrown around a lot.
Sullivan: It's almost like you have truth that you give us every night. But some of us, we just struggle every day to put whatever little bit of truth we can find on the internet and call it a blog. It's literally a web log, it's a log of your random, incessant thoughts, on the web.
Colbert: So a blog is web log? Is there an apostrophe, or do you guys not even have the strength for that? You're just gonna jam two words together?
Sullivan: Over time it just became a "blog."
Colbert: "Blog." It's a beautiful word. It's musical. So, uh, you type your thoughts and they appear on a screen instantly and that's it. That's what you do?
Sullivan: That's what I do.
Colbert: They used to call that typing. I don't trust you guys, because anybody could do that, right?
Sullivan: You don't. The only way you can trust anybody who blogs is by following them and making sure they're not full of it all the time. The one sign of a good blogger is that he immediately corrects a mistake. And unlike the New York Times, where they can put all of their millions of mistakes in a little box in the corner every day which you never read, a blogger has to fess up, right there, just like you do every night.

A video of the interview can currently be found on the Colbert Report website. The text next to the link to the video reads, "Andrew teaches Stephen about blogging, the coward's tool."

Time.com recently gave Sullivan's blog a redesign and Instapundit notes that the new blog is now "considerably more legible."