Richard Johnson, editor of New York Post's Page Six column: "I think they're more like parasites. A lot of them don't generate their own news stories. Some of them have been sued for publishing things they don't have the rights to publish. Mostly, they're just parasites." ... But, while interest in celebrities is increasing, PageSix.com was folded recently because "we were about two years too late" on the Internet.

"Targeting crotches with a bull's-eye is not the message we should be putting out there," she said in an e-mail interview.

Target offered an e-mail response:

"Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets," a public relations person wrote to ShapingYouth.

"This practice," the public relations person added, "is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest," as Target refers to its shoppers.

Word of the exchange quickly spread and the blogosphere did not appreciate the slight. "Target doesn't participate in new media channels?" asked the Web site for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Target "dismisses bloggers" commented the blog for Parents for Ethical Marketing. "Ahem! So bloggers don't count!" Ms. Jussel chimed in on ShapingYouth.

Yes, at least for now. "We do not work with bloggers currently," said a company spokeswoman, Amy von Walter, who agreed to speak with this traditional media outlet.

"But we have made exceptions," Ms. von Walter said. "And we are reviewing the policy and may adjust it."

But other than realizing how much it sounds like Olbermann, it dawned on me that when the elderly, squirrels and crazed dictators start blogging, then blogging is dead.

The worst five words you can hear at a party are "have you read my blog?" Blogs used be called diaries and they were covered with rainbow stickers and glitter. But now everyone calls them blogs and they suck.

I call it the Sylvia Plath Syndrome: The idea that every nuance of your life should fascinate everyone else. At least Plath had the decency to provide a killer ending.

Some think that if you don't blog, you don't have a life. But it's the opposite. You should be happy that you don't write for dopes who live in a disjointed bubble of weirdness where their own real world cowardice is masked by online bravery.

Smith first claims to Hoffarth that "internet writers" have no right to reach a large audience (we take it he's actually serious): "And when you look at the internet business, what's dangerous about it is that people who are clearly unqualified get to disseminate their piece to the masses. I respect the journalism industry, and the fact of the matter is ...someone with no training should not be allowed to have any kind of format whatsoever to disseminate to the masses to the level which they can. They are not trained. Not experts."

The fun continues as Smith tells Hoffarth that bloggers have "sabotaged" the dinosaur print media: "The people who suffer are the common viewers out there and, more importantly, those in the industry who haven't been fortunate to get a radio or television deal and only rely on the written word. And now they've been sabotaged. Not because of me. Or like me. But because of the industry or the world has allowed the average joe to resemble a professional without any credentials whatsoever."

Allow me to explain what I mean. I used to play air guitar with a band called Deep Purple. My playing was perfect, I had attitude and I even smashed my air guitar at the end of the number. The reason I played air guitar is that I couldn't play real guitar very well so I was forced to dwell in this fantasy world where my guitar playing meant something only to me. I should point out that this was years ago when I was still young and foolish. These days I play air tenor saxophone, which is far more challenging.

Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They're cobbled together by people who wouldn't stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It's rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.

It's even sadder when someone reads them.

Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors. As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing and that puzzles me. Are there really 70 million bloggers out there hoping that their writing talents will be recognised, or is this just another example of modern narcissism?

But the service of San Francisco-based Obvious Corp. might go down as one of the era's silliest fads, along with unreadable MySpace designs and blog widgets that display pictures of recent visitors.

These deep thoughts leap into the world as blog posts — as well as text and instant messages to blather-stream subscribers. But it probably won't take many posts about midnight fridge raids and toenails ripping through socks for readers to conclude their Twitter pals are turning into twits.

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and George pitch NBC "a show about nothing"? At one point Costanza asks a network executive, "What did you do today?"

"I got up and came to work," the exec replies.

"There's a show!" George exclaims. "That's a show."

That's also a Twitter.

They are interesting people. They think that they have something to say. They want to be read and heard and seen. But their aspiration is blocked by the obnoxious monster called the Editor and their high-voltage facts mixed with slam-dunk fiction, with a lot of typos and commas and semi-colons in wrong places, go down a drain called the Editorial Process. So they turn to blogging and take refuge under a series of posts on a web page in the form of a diary, with hypertext links to other such diaries. The bloggers love to attack those they hate: from McDonald's to Starbucks to Karl Marx to Mandal to Germaine Greer to the colleague at the next work station. Blogs are an online stream of consciousness written by people who believe that they are under orders from someone to change the world.

Good idea. But the pace at which the blogosphere is getting cramped with half-wits, religious maniacs, failed writers, sociopaths and cold-blooded killers, is scary. They all scream so loudly that those talking sense have to drop their decibel levels. Every 10 minutes, some three million new bloggers invade the WWW with a vengeance. It looks like revenge of the amateur who dreams of becoming a reporter. And that's a cause for concern. The editorial content - uncontrolled and unregulated - has made it free for all: In the UK, PayPerPost and Bloggers Republic offer such opinions that would invite legal suits in a newspaper; the US marines are using myspace.com for giving a positive spin to their stories from Iraq, and in Canada, an "angel of death" wrote a blog before shooting at 20 people. Forget wrong grammar and bad spellings, bloggers are now writing murders on the web.

G4: Do you do a lot of blogging from the road?

JARED: No, I think that blogging should die a sudden death.

G4: Why?

JARED: It's just ridiculous. It's like a playground for four-year-olds. People say and do things in the world of blogs that they would never do in real life, and I think it's a false experience. You know, it's, like, eating too much candy.

G4: So you don't read alot of the celebrity gossip blogs, I take it?

JARED: Well, you know, one of the things along those lines that bothers me about when people start citing blogs as news sources is that when people are writing on these blogs, they feel like they don't feel they need to do any research or back up their opinions with facts or anything, you know what I mean?

G4: Why is there this inherent lack of responsibility when it comes to blogging as journalism?

JARED: I couldn't tell you. Times have changed. It used to be, to be a writer you had to have experience and talent, and learn a craft. Now anybody with an opinion, which is anyone and everyone, feels that it's worthy. Technology is allowing people to have access to things where before it required very great skill. So there will be some interesting developments from that, and also some things that are pretty worthless. Pretty soon anybody with a cell phone is going to be able to be a news reporter. The blog is yesterday's parachute pants. It's here now but it's gone tomorrow.

JARED: Sometimes it's interesting, but most of the time the bloggers themselves are just trying to get famous so they can make some money and sell advertising dollars and duping these poor people who are on the internet all day long.

G4: Yeah, those people are lame. Anyways, I gotta run and go post this on G4's blog, TheFeed, so I can make some money, sell advertising dollars and dupe those poor people who are on the internet all day long. Suckers!

Record sales are on the mark
Cuz thats about the time the rumors start
Where all the people talking out their ass
Well, someone gotta school ya cause ya got no class
Well I've paid my dues
I'm a seasoned dame
So why you gotta throw salt in my game
You hide behind the computer screens so that you dont have to be seen
How could a person be so mean

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it. One popular technique for building readership is to send e-mail to more well-trafficked blogs offering to exchange links with them. One popular response from those blogs is to laugh derisively and hit the Delete button.

Another approach for advertising your blog is to mention it as much as possible in conversation; you'd be surprised how many people are fascinated to hear you have a blog and want to know more, especially if you were expecting the number to be greater than zero.

However, there are many popular blogs already in existence, and if you want people to think you're cool, you're probably better off claiming you were a "guest blogger" for one of them. Your average blog has so many guest bloggers and such a crappy search feature that nobody will ever be able to prove you wrong.

Boing Boing: Crocheted replica of subway map cracks DRM on collection of old video games.

Gawker: Paris Hilton does pretty much anything.

Engadget: Samsung releases new cell phone/mp3 player/camera/web browser/GPS/game player/wireless hub. Now in gray!

Cute Overload: A kitten licks a puppy while the puppy licks a bunny.

But those, I think, are the exceptions. Not wanting to risk unleashing a digital posse on me, but most blogs are pure noise. If you blog, you'll have to forgive me, but they can be the equivalent of the kind of white static hiss that your TV makes you reach for the off button. According to Pew's research, most bloggers (84 per cent) do it as a hobby, and 74 per cent do it based on a personal experience. In short, navel gazing.

Okay, it's easy to be skeptical of bloggers because so many aspire to the title of 'citizen journalist', yet fall short of what reporting means. Sure, your life is interesting. To you, perhaps, but unless you get caught up in the extraordinary, then it's really much like many other people's lives.

Surely an odd stance for an editor who spends his professional life writing about and experiencing the latest in digital trends? True, but bloggers will need to evolve from preening themselves in the mirror if they really are to become a force that rivals newspapers and TV.

News is what a CNN helicopter sees when flying over a shattered landscape – not the fact that someone on the ground got mud on their shoes. Bloggers have the numbers – a vast army of opinion formers. If they can now look beyond their personal bubbles, they might just change the world. Now, that really would be news.

WHO BLINKED? That was "Blink" author Malcolm Gladwell, the highly paid lecturer at business conferences everywhere, defending the viability of old media in a gabfest the other night at the New York Public Library to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the online magazine Slate. While former Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine and Slate founder Michael Kinsley predicted doom and gloom for newspapers in the Internet age, Gladwell sang the praises of paper products and derided bloggers as "parasites" who feed on newspapers to survive. If newspapers die, "What are they [the bloggers] going to do? Get jobs?" Gladwell mocked. Let's hope he's right.

I don't think the blogosphere is breeding cannibals. But it looks to me as if the world of blogs may be filling up with people who for the previous 200 millennia of human existence kept their weird thoughts more or less to themselves. Now, they don't have to. They've got the Web. Now they can share.

Technorati, a site that keeps numbers on the blogosphere, reports that as of this month the number of Web logs the site tracks is 35.3 million, and doubling every six months. Technorati claims each day brings 75,000 new blogs. We know something's happening here but I'm not sure we know what it is.

For sure the b'sphere will continue to remain the largest galaxy in the social media universe in the short term. It's a major center of gravity that pulls people toward it. However, over the last few months a number other social media galaxies have rapidly risen to prominence. Take YouTube, digg and MySpace. These are just three examples, but they are drawing huge audiences. Richard Edelman is gushing over a fourth - StupidVideos.com.

As these constellations grow, some will become larger and more influential than the blogosphere. We're already seeing early signs of this and the power brokers will shift. For example, mobile jones notes that Technorati's coverage of MySpace is sorely lacking. Technorati also does little to help us mine and track YouTube, digg, StupidVideos.com and countless other smaller galaxies of consumer generated media. They focus on blogs.

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave "new economy" a few years ago?

Shouldn't we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one - especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn't the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?

The inherent problem with blogging is that your brand resides in individuals. If they are fabulous writers, someone is likely to lure them away to a better salary and the opportunity for more meaningful work; if the writer tires and burns out, the brand may go down in flames with them.

Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

I have spent far too much time reading them while so many other tasks were left undone.

As a writer, I have lied to myself all these years and claimed that I was merely doing research. I told myself I was simply looking for interesting subjects about which to write.

No, I was procrastinating by reading about the lives of complete strangers.

At least, when I used to procrastinate with Minesweeper, I was developing important skills that I might later use in the unlikely event that I am ever recruited to become an international peacekeeper.

With blogs, I was just wasting time.

I am not saying that there is nothing of value in blogs. There are many excellent ones, even though I often wish the writers would spend more than a paragraph on a subject.

I loathe blogs, those Internet compendiums of people's thoughts on politics, news, gossip and their own navel lint.

During my last year in school, a close friend of mine constantly reminded me that I was falling behind. Blogs, he said, were the future

Gone is the intimacy of a personal phone call.

When I want to find out what friends are doing, I have to read their blogs.

Most of the time, that's just depressing because many bloggers I know suffer delusions of fantastic grandeur.

They seem to think managing a public forum is a little like being the hand of God, even if you are only posting about the price of your bikini wax or how boring it is to drink beer in your underpants on the sofa.

People I've known for years have become self-important. They just type, point and click, and suddenly they're experts in any field: Politics. Media. Deep thought.

After all, I've been stood up -- many times -- for blogs.

Nothing beats a Saturday night alone on the couch. Except, perhaps, a Saturday night when you're following your friends' real-time blog posts while fuming that they blew you off.

#23 Worst Overhyping of a Marketing Trend-BLOGS
Blogs provide almost no new information. They're frequently inaccurate. They contribute to the hysterical polarization of our nation's political discourse. And they're often written by people who can't, you know, write. So naturally marketers have flocked associate their brands with them. Seriously, it's not entirely clear why so many marketers have rushed to get themselves name-dropped in one of the most unreliable media environments yet invented, we're sure there's a PowerPoint presentation on their ROI being prepared as we write this.

Schadenfreude -- pleasure in others' misfortunes -- has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog. When someone trips, whether Dan Rather or Eason Jordan or Judith Miller, bloggers are the bloodthirsty masses slavering for a public flogging. Incivility is their weapon and humanity their victim.

I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people out there -- professors, lawyers, doctors, philosophers, scientists and other journalists who also happen to blog. Again, they know who they are. But we should beware and resist the rest of the ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction.

We can't silence them, but for civilization's sake -- and the integrity of information by which we all live or die -- we can and should ignore them.

30 of the 50 blog networks will fizzle out and/or die. Only one or two (other than Gawker) will break 20M pages a month. The blog network space is just way too crowded, and if you can't go big at this point you're gonna have a real hard time doing a *real* network (say 20 blogs or more). Now, you'll do just fine if you stay focused on a narrow niche that you can own.

For a journalist, technologist, politician or anyone with a pulse and who doesn't know everything, blogs matter. Every morning I can wake up to lots of IQ ruminating, fulminating, arguing, evangelizing and even disapassionately reporting on the latest happenings in the areas that interest me, people from every corner of the globe. That's certainly preferable to the old world and worth putting up with what comes along with putting the means of production in the hands of anyone with a connection to the Net…

Insight capture merits the full weight of all our attention and expertise in the publishing industry, because it is only through trapping "the best of the rest" that we shall ever achieve the promise of the bumper sticker: 'None of us is smarter than all of us.' Unfortunately insight doesn't reside in blogs any more than wisdom resides in Fortune cookies. Insight is more chaordic: it occurs wherever opportunity meets preparation, at conferences, in airplanes, on trains, in private e-mail exchanges. Above all, it takes place in context. If there were a way of capturing such epiphanies, if one could but scale them up so that humanity could benefit from epiphany-en-masse, then that would be quite another pair of shoes. But waiting for the Epiphany Machine to come around makes waiting for Godot look reasonable by comparison; and anyone who thinks blogging is the light at the end of the tunnel of collective consciousness has failed to spot that it's much more likely to be the headlight of an oncoming train called The Techno-fad Express.

"Unfortunately insight doesn't reside in blogs any more than wisdom resides in Fortune cookies."

What does that mean?....that's just idiotic. You don't think blogs are chaordic?

You are right in one sense -- blogging is just a medium, available to anyone with a connection, and you seem to be using it (is is a column or a blog?) and getting enjoyment out of spreading your own verbiage, demonstrating your cleverness, connecting blogs, chaordic, epiphanies, scuba diving, Web 3.0 and Beckett -- and adding to the pile...

Robert Mason (not his real name) would love to spend a few minutes during lunch catching up on blog posts from around the web, but his company doesn't allow it. The financial institution where Mason works as a vice president has security filters set up to block access to -- among other things -- any website that contains the phrase "blog" in the URL.

What's more, says Mason, such practices are becoming prevalent in corporate America, particularly in financial services. Mason sits on a roundtable privacy group of 20 of the country's largest banks. "My best understanding is that my company's anti-blog stance is the industry norm," he says.

Keith Crosley, director of corporate communications at censorware company Proofpoint, says there's no anti-blog conspiracy at work, but that some companies have higher security, privacy and regulatory needs that require greater diligence over what companies can and cannot do. In particular, companies worry that employees might leak sensitive material -- perhaps inadvertently -- while posting comments to blog message boards. In a survey of over 300 large businesses conducted in conjunction with Forrester, Proofpoint found 57.2 percent of respondents were concerned with employees exposing sensitive material in blogs. That's higher than the portion concerned with the risks of P2P networks.

Work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2% of U.S. labor force hours.

Work time spent at blogs unrelated to work will eat up 1.65% of labor force hours.

U.S. workers this year will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years (based on a 24-hour day) or 2.3 million work years (based on a typical nearly 40-hour work week) reading blogs unrelated to the job.

There is strong evidence of workday blogging. Server traffic for Blogads, a network of sites that take ads, spikes during business hours, reflecting page views on about 900 blogs. FeedBurner, a blog technology company, also sees a jump in work-time hits.

Bosses accept some screwing off as a cost of doing business; it keeps employees happy and promotes camaraderie. Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, said blogs have become the favored diversion for "office goof-off time," though he notes it's hard to segregate blog time since blogs often bounce readers to professional media sites.

But at the end of the day, more blogging means less working. Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, said at-work blog time probably comes in addition to regular surfing -- meaning more time on the Web but less time on the job.

You know how it works. You're sitting at your terminal, minding your own business, when the Powers That Be rush in shouting some new term. "Blogs!" they yell, "Blooooggggsss! We must have a blog!" while wildly waving some business magazine article in your face. Erk.

While you don't have much of a choice in the matter, the fact is that many hot new technologies aren't always appropriate for everyone. While they may seem hip and get written about with breathless abandon by business magazines, not all new trends are worthwhile.

They can often turn into giant time-sucks or, worse yet, end up mouldering on the server, starved for the content they need to keep going, making the company look worse by the day as the "last updated" date ages ungracefully.

1. No barriers to entry. The publishing platform is free and easily hackable (Wordpress). Google Adsense is available to anyone with an email account. Topics are a dime a dozen. And design can be outsourced. What’s left?

2. Brand is the only competitive advantage. So if you can't compete on technology or advertising, what can you compete on? The publisher’s brand. Even though I've been publishing online for several years now, I really haven't spent time building credibility. This point is unbelievably crucial. It’s just critical.

It wasn't long before the gaming webmasters, who originally started their gaming news sites as a hobby, started demanding pay raises for their work and no longer saw managing their website as a favored pastime. Once a price tag is attached to a hobby, it no longer becomes a hobby. Webmasters defected from one gaming network to higher paying ones. Networks poached webmasters from rivals by offering higher incomes. It was a cut throat environment. This hasn't happened in the blogosphere yet, but I can already see the writing on the wall as weblog network owners are being labeled "slave drivers".

It was the low barrier of entry that created the gaming network popularity and it was the same low barrier of entry that destroyed it. Because the barrier of entry was so low everyone was entering the market. Just like in the blogosphere there were dozens of websites about each niche interest. Advertisers caught wind of this and the advertising money was quickly pulled. The largest online demographic with significant buying power (ages 14-25) was no longer able to keep the attention of the advertisers. Advertising contracts were drying up and websites were shutting down.

To lay it all on the line, blogging is a waste of time. Why spend time telling strangers your innermost thoughts when you could be out making memories with those you care about most? I'm not saying all blogers are losers, I'm just saying that most of them are.

About five years ago, the popularity of personal Web sites was booming. Everyone with a buddy list had his or her own Web site. It was a simple site, with a few pictures, some text, and some outdated information that no one ever read. Since then, the birth and the growing epidemic of people who realize they have opinions replaced the humble personal Web page. Enter the Internet blog.

Some blog sites would like to maintain the image of being an online diary, but diaries are personal. The purpose of a diary is to write for yourself, but most people don't do this. Not everyone is out to impress or gain something from their blog. Some people blog for absolutely no reason at all, and it shows.

Finally, there are the most hated of all bloggers: The quiz whores. Why would anyone else want to know what "Napoleon Dynamite" character you're most like?

Most folks are by now accepting that blogging - or at least popular participation in media through easy online tools - is not a temporary fad. What more people are becoming impatient with, however, is the attitude that everything blog is gold. We've almost passed the point where every article about blogs has to offer a parenthetical "short for Weblog" explanation, but how long before "blog" is just another part of the media, not warranting any special attention?

My question has to do with why you visit, read, and leave posts on blogs (like this one).

There are so many other sources of information available on the topics you are interested in: Web sites, articles, books.

Most of these sources are (in my opinion) better written, better researched, more authoritative, and more thought out than blogs. Do you agree?

So why not just read books, periodicals, and Web sites? Why do you read blogs ... and bother writing posts on them?

Large swathes of the journalistic profession (though not, I am glad to say, either The Observer or the Guardian ) are still in denial about blogging. In that sense, they resemble music industry executives circa 1999, denying the significance of online file- sharing. But the claim that blogging is a threat to journalism - that inside every blogger is a 'journalist-wannabe' trying to escape - is just daft.

What's happening is a small but significant change in our media ecology. All journalists worth their salt have always known that out there are readers, listeners or viewers who know more about a story than they do. But until recently, there was no effective way for this erudition or scepticism to find public expression. Letters to the editor rarely attract public attention - or impinge on the consciousness of journalists.

Blogging changes all that. Ignorant, biased or lazy journalism is instantly exposed, dissected and flayed in a medium that has global reach.

These days, the hype about blogs is off the charts.

And you know what that usually means: Run for cover, because a bubble is going to burst and make a big mess.

Just about everybody is either celebrating blogs or worrying about blogs, which are essentially online journals.

A couple of weeks ago, BusinessWeek ran a cover story titled, "Blogs will change your business," in which the magazine likened blogs to the invention of the printing press.

Thankfully, it doesn't look like that is happening in the absolute sense of the definition: meaning we aren't seeing a repeat of the kind of crazy venture capital investment and public investing through IPOs in unproven startups that we saw in the late 1990s -- and that precipitated the stock market downturn in 2000.

That Cosmic Crash You Heard last Monday was the sound of a million egos collapsing when a new Pew/BuzzMetrics study failed to find inordinate agenda influence by bloggers in the 2004 presidential campaign.

In fact, eMarketer Inc. said recently that there is evidence that most U.S. Internet users don't know what a blog is. And that only 4 percent of major U.S. corporations have blogs available to the public for purposes such as corporate marketing, communications, or advertising.

Every week, it seems, another friend e-mails to announce that he, or he and his wife, or he and his wife and his baby, have launched a blog on which I can follow the intimate details of their lives, as if I were not already bored enough with the intimate details of my own.

What does concern me, though, is this altogether frightening question: If I am to remain a good friend to my blogging pals, am I required to read their blogs? Please, tell me the answer is no. Because if it's yes, I think this will be the end of a number of beautiful friendships. There's just no getting around it: Some of my friends' blogs are so mind-numbingly banal they have me wishing for the early days of the Web when the most exciting thing to do was search for a Blues Traveler screensaver.

At a time when media conferences like "Les Blogs" in Paris two weeks ago debate the potential of the form, and when BusinessWeek declares, as it did on its May 2 cover, that "Blogs Will Change Your Business," Mr. Denton is withering in his contempt. A blog, he says, is much better at tearing things down -- people, careers, brands -- than it is at building them up. As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it this way: "Give me a break."

"The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe," he said. "They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed."

BW: Will blogs be a big business?
Meckler: I'm somewhat jaundiced about the real economic impact, in terms of revenue. About 99.99% of all blogs are essentially worthless. It’s another medium, that's all it is.

Back in the 1990s Drudge was a believer in the empowering potential of the internet. In a speech he said, "We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be." Now he sounds disillusioned and says that the "din" is growing into a cacophony: "There’s a danger of the internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention." He is no fan of the blogging phenomenon (weblogs linking sites): "I don’t read them. I like to create waves and not surf them. And who are these influential bloggers? You can’t name one because they don't exist."

This Internet stuff has gotten out of hand, and just because widely available, simple-to-use technology makes it possible to share your goofy opinions with billions of people doesn't mean you should. Blogs -- Web logs -- are sources of rumor, innuendo and downright lies, and there's no control over what goes into one. Doofs too naive to discern ravings from reportage cite them as if they were factual. There are enough misinformed people already, thank you. Blogs are also a lot of work. Oh sure, it sounds fun, ragging on Ryan Seacrest one day and posting your plan for Mideast peace the next. But then you realize that if you don't keep updating the blog, the pack of dimwits hanging on your every word will dwindle.

The vast majority of the 8 million or so blogs currently in existence have few if any ads. Many are run by hobbyists or armchair commentators, some of whom sign up to carry tiny text ads from a large pool of advertisers through a service from Google Inc. The ads generate revenue only when a visitor clicks on the ad. Most bloggers, like Ronni Bennett, a former television producer who lives in New York's Greenwich Village and writes about aging on timegoesby.net, can't even offset the cost of her Internet access. Her site gets between 1,200 and 1,500 page views a day, bringing in all of $50 since December 2004.

"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web."

"It turns out that the Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief."

"Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."

"a) he's simply a very, very bad writer, or b) he lacks any skills of a diplomatic nature, or it's just c) he really believes that statements like "Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts" are somehow going to disabuse people who keep blogs, journals and such from believing or repeating the calumny that "Michael Gorman is an idiot" (someone apparently said this on a blog, he tells us, expecting us to feel an outrage on his behalf I somehow wasn't able to muster)."