In the few free moments I’ve had today, I’ve been checking out my competition at the Koufax awards for Best New Blog. Gee, I’m just honored to be nominated. No, really. There are some damn good ones out there.
James Wolcott’s blog is worth a look. He’s the managing editor for Vanity Fair and writes like a dream. I am not sure if he’s an original political thinker or not yet. He goes out on a limb and comes out four square against torture. Quite a risk. But I’ll read more and see what he has to say. Anyway, I like the insider gossip about the magazine industry.
I haven’t had a chance to do an official counting, but a good number of those new blogs are written by professional writers, Washington insiders, or tenured faculty. No longer are bloggers grad students or untenured professors or computer programmers. They are pros.
Interestingly, their sidebars don’t include many of the older blogs.
Is this a revolution? Will blogging lose its underground edge or will it become even better with finer writing and more astute commentary?
Apt. 11d 
I’ve noticed that too–the blogroll isn’t nearly as big a deal as it once was, and a lot of blogs with big names attached that have recently come onto the scene (like Left2Right) don’t have one at all. Does this mean that they don’t read other blogs? I think that’s a likely conclusion. So if Wolcott-type blogs–with the resources and admitted talent behind them–begin to crowd aside older, once-common reads, what becomes of the blogosphere?
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I don’t think either will happen. Blogs are like books — or magazines. Just because Time exists, or the latest Grisham, doesn’t mean that things like Mother Jones or college samizdat publications will disappear. The popular _conception_ of what “blog” means will no doubt change, but not necessarily blogs themselves. Ditto “the blogosphere” — a term often used to refer to a small subset of the much larger whole. Changes in _part_ of the blogosphere whole don’t necessarily translate into changes in another part.
(I think it helps one’s perspective to regularly visit a number of personal diary-type blogs and hobby blogs — if nothing else, it reminds you that “blog” really refers to a means of communication, not a particular topic or viewpoint.)
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I agree with Rana. I think in time we’ll stop thinking of ‘pro’ blogs as part of the same ecosystem as underground, amateur, and personal blogs.
They are currently different universes held together by the same software.
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There used to be (and probably still is) a lot of interlinking in blogs “about” blogging. I picture teenage girls visiting each other’s sites to see if so-and-so has posted about them. The blogrolls are an integral part of their blogging experience. For others, such as the pros you mention, perhaps it is not.
When I’m trying to decide whether to bookmark or subscribe to the feed of a blog I’ve encountered, I often check the blogroll to determine if the author and I have common ground. (In the same way that I used to be able to check the card in the back of library books to see who else had checked it out, but that’s an entirely different subject.)
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