Jeff Cooper at Cooped-Up riffs off one of those “newspaper discovers weblogs” articles and makes an important point:
Second, the four blogs in the original article are among the most popular in the blogosphere, with tens of thousands (and sometimes over a hundred thousand) visits per day. They’re important blogs, to be sure, but they’re not exactly representative of what blogging is these days. More typical are Cooped Up, with its 350 or so visits per day, or Planet Swank, with its 100 or so, or Jessica’s inexplicably-overlooked blog, which averages 60 or so. There are thousands upon thousands of blogs out there, some worth reading, others less so, but all part of an ongoing exchange of ideas that would not have been possible just a few years ago. Blogs encourage individual voices in ways that internet bulletin boards don?t–bulletin boards tend to be dominated by the loudest and most forceful voices, while blogs encourage a single writer to develop ideas and arguments in a more considered manner than is possible on bulletin boards, while simultaneously encouraging dialog with readers and other bloggers. Marshall, Sullivan, and Kaus represent the blogosphere’s surface; they rarely note the numerous conversations that are bubbling below them (Reynolds’s Instapundit, again, is an exception–he links to bloggers big and small). Individually, blogs like mine may not be important, but collectively I think they do make a difference in the way a small but significant portion of the population sees and thinks about the world.