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Weekly Standard editor Andrew Ferguson hates Twitter and all those who use it, apparently.

He spares some snark for a Twittering New York Times reporter's analysis of the blindingly obvious. But with a bit of stop-and-think, his lament follows a logic that perhaps he could anticipate as well.

The whole point of devices like Twitter is to weaken the barrier between other people's ideas and your brain. They make no guarantees that other people have good ideas; just that they'll get to you more often.

The rise of blogs gave us now time-tested independent, muckraking — or at the very least incendiary — journalism. The Drudge Report and Talking Points Memo are names so ubiquitous in the political scene that I don't really need to link them; you likely don't need to get more than five characters into their URL before your browser realizes where you're headed when you type in their addresses.

YouTube and the social networking evolution gave us the rise of political video, which has been ever-so-useful in the kind of accountability enforcement some pols label "gotcha journalism."

So yes, like as not twitter will come with a crop of, as Ferguson calls them, twits. But that doesn't mean the reduced cost of entry won't bring some king (or queen) of one-liners, or, as we saw during the RNC, won't enable blazingfast, crowd-sourced, spot-news coverage.