I'd disagree- Blogging is a true "HOORAY FOR MEDIOCRITY" event.

By way of explanation: What the hell is a blog? It's a homepage with a content-management system.

Now, anything that makes it easier to get content online is, obviously a good thing for this heah intarweb, but that's all it is. What makes blogging so 'powerful' today is its ability to propagate its own inflated idea of self-importance, in part because of its 'founders' (erm, didn't it exist for a while before whatever that stupid bestseller was was written?), and in part because of its ability to, say, skew Google results. In fact, it's interesting to consider the Google connection in that light- instead of solving the problem, buy it, milk it as long as it lasts, and call it integration.

Now, I'm the sort of guy who sees The Web as a cutesy reimplementation of Gopher/WAIS, so maybe I'm just 'hopeless,' but the 'homepage' was *supposed* to have been easy to construct and manage since the early days of the web, so celebrating blogging seems, at best, like celebrating XP for not bluescreening every half hour.

From there, I could argue that the bloggosphere is destined to the same fates as Geocities and TheGlobe, but I won't- because, if there's one place blogging succeeds, it's as a business model. It gets users to write content, something (Suck, Salon) once had to pay actual authors to do. Because the whole *draw* is the managed layout, it's a lot easier to wedge ads into a free blog service than to make them float over some blink-tagged Mathnet fanfiction site. *Because* the marketers have successfully tricked bloggers into thinking they're part of The Revolution, it's damn easy to convince them to shell out to move up in the Party ranks- I have no idea what addedvaluefeatures Livejournal is selling, but I know people are actually scrimping and saving to buy them, given the amount of whining I hear about it on MUCKs and IRC.

That self-importance is, of course, what's going to eventually crash the fad (in the same way "that whole internet fad" crashed- no doubt a good number of users will still be hanging around, despite whatever consensus reality is supposed to be that week) - once the heavy users notice that the mood rings and love beads they've been shelling out for [haven't actually brought about world peace | seem to have been making some other 'hippies' really rich], they're going to get disheartened, their feeds will collapse to the same old angst-ridden shit 98% of blogs are, and people will go back to reading... other people's websites. (Notice again how the beauty of 'blogging' is that, having no strict definition, it has no strict failure mode?)

That said, if your eyes are too clouded with 'Blogging good! Anti-blogging corporate Starbucks NBC propaganda!' sentiment to realize it- duh I agree the ability to produce and distribute personal content worldwide is empowering. The internet, on the whole, has been doing that and will continue to do it, with our without one specific service or protocol. (Okay, maybe inflated Pageranks are making it easier for the clueless masses to 'Tune In,' but does anyone actually spend their day flipping between MSNBC and Disney.com?) If you want something halfway innovative, consider Wikis (blog++, but unfortunately, still a pain in the ass to use), or something like Peercast.org, which is mindblowingly cool even if IPv6 should theoretically give us all multicast and blow it out of the water.

The real revolution will be televised in a medium that doesn't exist yet.