Belligerati

All this suggests that an enormous percentage of blog readers are also blog writers. The real impact of blogs on modern culture we be felt after readership spreads beyond this hardened core or writer/readers.

Most blogs are boring, pointless, and/or wrong, so no wonder. Casual blog readers need reputation systems to know who to read and trust.
However, with millions of blogs, these reputation systems had better be automated. Right now these tools are in their infancy. A solid fix to the blogging and traceback spam, will go a long way to fixing the reputation problems of blogging. Extensive public interconnections between blogs is an essential a prerequisite to automated reputation systems like Technorati and Google. My guess is that this is going to take a lot longer than the leading bloggers think it will, perhaps even many years. But they are right about the trajectory, if not the delivery date. Given enough time the best bloggers are going to be as wildly ready and heavy in impact as the most wildly read projects from traditional media. But, in the process the two may synthesize. Major magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and Reason have formed their own blogs. So if a magazine updates as articles gets published and has tracebacks and comments, is it a blog? IF a blog has a professional editor, thousands of readers, and multiple authors, is it a magazine?