origins of blogosphere

I'm just going to make this claim now and get it out of the way. I think that Orson Scott Card correctly spelled out how important internet communities would become in the future in his book Ender's Game.

In the book, Ender's siblings gain some political ears and social power though posting on a system that is essentially like the internet (but very reflective of how it existed in the 1980s). These kids were able to move political opinion like stones in a game of Go. I think that the system describes fairly accuratly describes the direction that the blogosphere wants to take. Now I'm not expecting some nobody from nowhere to grab the ear of world leaders as strongly as they did, but the sense of an individual citizen creating that much power with the written word is definitly accurate.

I'm curious as to what others think about this. Is there another book published earlier than 1985 that spells something like this out? I could always use another good book to read. The focus would have the be texted based community through a network that acutally has some purpose to it's existence.