The Internet rewrites power structures. It's not just a matter of "information is power." It's also about the ability to speak, to communicate ideas and points of view. In the old hierarchical mass-media model, institutions (government, corporate) gathered and were reluctant to share such power. In the new world, social organization can proceed on a non-hierarchical model. Some might even call it a web (although arachnid webs actually are highly structured).

Poynter's Rick Edmonds, in a rambling review of the ten-trends sort, says "Measurement is easy" and adds "Actionable measurement is tougher."

I'll go way beyond that: Measurement is outright hard, and it can be dangerously misleading.

A good metrics system is a boon to any site -- for sales purposes.

But for analysis, beware. We don't know what we don't know, and serving up a bunch of dazzling charts, graphs and heatmaps is a good way to be led astray.

Some examples:

If newspaper editorial pages are to add any value in this anyone-can-publish era, that value will come from maintaining and defending a standard of truth. No discussion is ever improved by a deliberate misstatement of the facts. But the garbage that shows up on op-ed pages these days is full of it, and I'm not just talking about Ann Coulter.

One of the more self-destructive traits of American journalism is the general disdain of local reporting. In the news biz there is a pecking order, and second-worst place to be is a suburban bureau. The absolutely worst place to be is a newspaper so small that it doesn't have any suburban bureaus.

Writing for Slate, media commentator Jack Schafer piles it on, saying newspapers that focus on local news are "dumbing down" and "targeting a less-educated audience."

Our nannies in the House of Representatives officially declared war on social networking yesterday, overwhelmingly passing a law that would prohibit public schools and libraries from allowing anyone not an adult to use "chat rooms" and "social networking" sites. The definition is so broad that most of the Internet could be blocked.

Pew's report "Bloggers: A portrait of the Internet's new storytellers" has already been thoroughly discussed by the usual suspects, but I can't resist observing that the Hindu fable of the blind men and the elephant is once again in play. Much nonsense about the blogosphere has been written by people who apparently have encountered only the tusk or the trunk. The Pew report paints a more complete picture.

I lost a lot of work in progress when my Compaq Evo laptop bit the dust, but the thing that has surprised me is how hard it's been to lose my RSS feeds. A key part of my job is keeping up with what's happening on the Internet, and suddenly I'm ... disconnected. Bam! Losing a couple of years' worth of email is hard; losing a huge list of RSS feeds turns out to be much harder.

I have an OPML file backed up ... from about a year ago. The best stuff came from the most recently added feeds. It's like losing part of your mind.