My friend and fellow Michigan fellow John Fountain, midwest correspondent for the New York Times, has published his first book, True Vine. Really looking forward to reading it.

If it's anything like as evocative and moving as the accounts of his childhood and career he gave us at Wallace House - and during our visit to Providence St Mel's school in Chicago - it will be a treasure.

And entirely appropriate that this blog should kick off today, given that it's the fifth anniversary - can you believe it? - of the Drudge Report's breaking of the Monicagate story. Here's Drudge's own account of the events surrounding that seismic shift in the relationship between traditional media - what Drudge calls the "mainpress" - and the upstart internet interlopers.

While the event may or may not live up to the AFP's - possibly tongue-in-cheek - description of it as being on a par with Marconi's first radio wave broadcast or the launch of MTV, there's no doubt that while Drudge owes more to Walter Winchell than Woodstein, his role in the affair is central to an understanding of how traditional media outlets responded to and subsequently handled the story.

As Drudge says: "Speed Beat Spin". But what was, of course, more significant was that the event signalled the coming of age of a specifically net-driven 24-hour news cycle; with all the hype and potential pitfalls that went along with it.

This is the first posting on this blog, which I hope will provide a semi-coherent commentary on modern media, politics and the convergence between the two. I've called it "Another Stream in the Firehose", in acknowledgment of the by now quoted-to-death reference by Richard Lanham in "The Electronic Word"; where he likens trying to consume information to drinking from a firehose.

So, this is my humble contribution to the billions of bits circulating the planet each day. As Lanham says, as the volume of available information increases, what inevitably becomes more valuable is the time we need to filter and consume it.

Well, from today you'll need another fifteen seconds.