I'm interested at the level of defensiveness that is being posted here. Lots of time spent tucking into "blogs" and the people who write them. It sounds a lot like shooting the messenger and overlooking the real business effects of what has happened. In defense of blogging therefore:

Note that many "legitimate" websites are now generating RSS feeds. Why did this happen? Because the preferred tool for reading blogs is an aggregator and the number of people using aggregators, and presumably also getting a significant proportion of their information from them, has reached the point where ther NYTimes and WaPo feel that it is in their interest to provide those feeds.

Feeds which, incidentally, strip out the advertising that is the supposed revenue generator for the business. Hmm, powerful media providing revenue free services; are they worried about something perhaps?

There's talk of MS using blogs to garner feedback for their software, but that doesn't need a blog, it could be done right here on a bulletin board. Now enabling its staff to have their own blogs, like Joshua Allen at Better Living Through Software, that's an innovation for a big company, one that is trying to get on the Cluetrain and have a conversation with its customers.

Plenty of slagging off of the quality of the content on blogs. But that quality is highly variable, as are mainstream media stories and the postings on this board, at least one of which was so inflammatory that it was removed. The best blogs make damned fine sources of information, more importantly they make damned fine filters and analysers of that information, just like the "legitimate" media, except that they are fact checked to hell and back by their readers. A bit like Dan Rather.

But its not the content that really matters, its the connections. Someone whines about Google, but google only measures the internet currency you hold, the blogs would not rise to the top so often unless they were actively linked from other people who find them interesting and worth recommending to others. If you depend on Google for good information, maybe you should stop trying to second guess it and see what its flow offers you.

Page Rank is what its about, Technorati does something similar, as does AllConsuming.net and as those whiteboarded opinions are subjected to the relentless and merciless forces of the online marketplace, some of them float to the top and their rate of propagation rises rapidly. Isn't that what SEO is supposed to do?

The successful link attractors make it to the general consciousness. And it doesn't matter that bloggers were wrong about Target selling dope, what they did was expose a business problem in the way that Target and Amazon have configured their online relationship. Bloggers may not have a lot of influence, but the first soccer mum to log into Target and find it apparently selling porn or dope, will damned soon have some influence; maybe Target needs a better way of listening to its own voice on the net. Maybe blogs are the answer.

You have to stand back a little to witness the blogosphere and its dicussions, they are like real world ones, they don't happen at your end or mine, but in the space between us, and the space between our ears. From a human perspective they are nothing new, we do conversation fairly well.

From a networked technology perspective, however, they are new, and from an information ownership and propagation perspective, they are a pointer to a very interesting, and much less controllable, future.

So lighten up folks, better still, start a blog, you may be surpised