I think this article tries to make a complex question simple, but fails. Blogs are a communication medium that makes any person a commentator, journalist, evangelist with fewer barriers than any medium before it.
This makes blogs by their very nature, receptacle of endless amounts of garbage and some very good gems of content in between.
The mistake of many in the mainstream media is taking the breadth of blogs seriously instead of focusing on the small gems of good conversation and argument. Blogs also enforce a kind of groupthink that can become unhealthy. For example Moveon.orgs’s constant attacks on General Patreous in 2007 may have not caused on fuss on the left wing blogs, but once it was unleashed in mainstream media created a firestorm.
The same thing happened with immigration reform and the right wing blogs. Most right wingers were shocked to find out that many more republicans were moderate on immigration then originally thought.
I still love blogs. They allow me to sharpen my arguments and occasionally get enlightened by something I never knew before. But the fact is that blogs have a major role in allowing people to vent in ways they never thought possible. It is a useful outlet for many, but produces a blogosphere jammed with garbage and dittoheads.
