Blogs

The blog 'œrevolution' has hit a brick wall, said Trevor Butterworth in the Financial Times. Just a couple of years ago, giddy Internet pioneers were predicting that weblogs—Web sites created by individuals, with diary-like postings—were growing so fast that they'd depose the mainstream media as Americans' main source of news, opinion, and specialized knowledge. As the masses flocked to Web sites such as Dailykos.com and Instapundit.com, the digital prophets said, advertisers would stampede to the blogs' youthful niche audiences, and The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune would collapse under the weight of their obsolescence. Guess what? said the Chicago Tribune in an editorial. It's not happening that way. Sure, 27 million people are now posting their chatty personal and political musings on Web sites of their own creation—but a new Gallup poll finds that only 9 percent of Internet users 'œfrequently' read blogs. In a list of 13 common Internet activities, reading blogs was ranked dead last. You can't have a revolution without readers.

It's not that no one is reading blogs, said Clive Thompson in New York magazine. A few A-list blogs, in fact, attract hundreds of thousands of readers a day, including Boingboing.net, a site on new technology and gadgets, and liberal polemicist Arianna Huffington and her posse of famous friends. A handful of entrepreneurs have even made small fortunes off of A-list blogs, by selling ads; others have cashed in by selling the sites to big companies like AOL eager to get in on the Next Big Thing. Does that sound familiar? said Daniel Gross in Slate.com. It should: Blogs today are like the Internet was in 1999—a bubble of irrational exuberance that's just about to burst.

That depends on how you think of blogs, said Eric Zorn in the Chicago Tribune. If you think of them as freestanding businesses, replacing the Times or the Tribune—no, that's not going to happen. But blogs have created a new medium—combining the written word, images, sound, interactivity with readers, and most of all immediacy—that is changing the way we consume information. Newspapers now have their own blogs. So do TV networks, corporations, and many big, established Web sites. In a few years, said Jason Fry in The Wall Street Journal Online, no one will speak of blogs as some separate phenomenon. Blogs will be seen as just another source of information and ideas, like radio, TV, print, and the rest of the Web. 'œThat may not sound like the stuff of revolution,' but it's hardly 'œa fad or a failure.'

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