All these discussions with the Killians and others took place after the blogosphere had worked its magic, beginning when www.freerepublic.com suggested the documents might not be real.
Such was the spark that began the flame that grew into the wildfire that became the conflagration that threatens to consign journalistic credibility to history's ash heap.
Fueling the fire in the earliest stages were most notably Power Line (www.powerlineblog.com) and Little Green Footballs (www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog), which ran the just-discovered memos through some simple tests to verify their authenticity.
Key to the unraveling of CBS's hyped documents, as bloggers pointed out, were the superscript 'th' and the Times New Roman font used in the alleged Killian memo, both of which seem to belong to a rather modern Microsoft Word default letter-writing program rather than a 1972-era typewriter.
Make that yet another victory for the nerds, but not nerds in pajamas , as former CBS executive Jonathan Klein said in an attempt to impugn bloggers.
"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances (at '60 Minutes') and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing," said Klein.
The implication that bloggers are slacker dust bunnies has delighted bloggers, the best of whom are lawyers, professors, scientists, renegade journalists and techies of various sorts, such as the brothers Johnson (Charles and Michael) at "Little Green Footballs," whose years of experience in state-of-the-art graphics and Web design at the "pixel level" enabled them to quickly duplicate the CBS memos and demonstrate their likely origin on a very modern computer.
All of which brings me to my premise that the blogosphere isn't just a challenge to journalism in its currently stagnant state, but a potential boon to problem-solving of a higher order. The beauty of the blogosphere is that it is self-igniting, self-propelling and self-selecting, a sort of intellectual ecosystem wherein the best specimens from various disciplines descend from the ethers, converge on an issue and apply their unique talents.
Though virtually newborn, the blogosphere has blossomed exponentially in a matter of Earth-time seconds, from a few random voices to a mighty and diverse chorus of sometimes spectacular talent. Bloggers are the Big Bang of the Information Age.
It seems, therefore, not unreasonable to hope that as this new galaxy expands - with the best and brightest emerging as natural evolution commands - bloggers might apply their immense energy and collective intellect to solving an array of human problems.
Let's start with Iraq, shall we?