Aww, cute, a blogging story

I always like it when the newspaper folks try to write about blogs. It always strikes me that they just don't get it. For instance:

Blogs are different from the personal Web pages that were popular a few years ago because they are more interactive, designed to look like a dialogue between the blogger and the audience.

No, blogs are different in that they often are dialogues between the blogger and the readers (audience strikes me as a poor term to capture most people reading blogs - it implies too much passivity, I think). But I think even this doesn't get at the real differences between blogging and just having your own personal page. The big deal with blogs, in my mind, is that they present both on-the-fly journaling of the writers' impressions, and researched opinions citing evidence (dubious as it may be) of many facts presented. For instance, when I compare the average political blog to the average newspaper article, I see much more sourcing of information in the blog. The Post article I quote above says that there are 15 million blogs, but provides no way to verify that figure. I'd expect a blog to link to a study that provides that number. Blogs are like some kind of weird hybrid between a research paper and a teenager's diary.

The post article goes into a little bit of fear mongering too:

"I certainly don't advise anyone to do it. They're taking a big risk," said Patricia Wallace, a psychologist and researcher at Johns Hopkins University and author of "The Psychology of the Internet." People open themselves up to cruel comments, and worse: identity theft, for instance, or even losing a job for kvetching about a boss.

A bit over the top with the identity theft thing, perhaps, but there are reasons I do this anonymously.