This is usually Susannah's shtick, so I offer my apologies for stealing her act.

Following a trail blazed by reverse cowgirl Susannah, I reached the LA Times and their recent article on "real" journalists taking on the bloggers' turf. While there I decided to dig for some more articles on weblogs and found two more from the Chicago Tribune. (Long story, don't ask.) Here are tidbits from all three that I found interesting. Their import is best left to the reader.

Ceci n'est pas un blog: "The recipe: Surf the net, compile links to the most interesting stuff you find, leaven with a bit of punditry and personality, and post to a Web page in the form of a dated online diary... The formula, which Internet columnist Matt Drudge didn't invent but made famous, is as simple and traditional as white bread."

So whatcha call this here place? Blog Space, where, "[not] surprisingly... one good blog links to scads of others, so new talent surfaces rather quickly."

Beggars and choosers: "Whether 390,000 or 50,000, [Blogger] users include some pros such as author and former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com) and futurist Virginia Postrel (www.dynamist.com)... But the legion of Sullivan-Postrel wannabes have spread the graphics bug that directs the viewer to the company's home page beyond the pundit community." (Links added.)

You have much to learn, grasshopper: "The words of Dr. Quentin Schultze, my mentor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., and author of the upcoming book 'Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age,' are ringing in my ears after he e-mailed them yesterday: 'The problem is that bloggers typically do not see their role as contributing to a shared public life. Instead, they tend to blog as a matter of purely personal and often self-disclosing venting of personal feelings... The best blogging is truly journalistic —aimed at contributing to the public good, not to personal catharsis...'"

Ready for prime-time? "The word 'blog,' a contraction of 'Weblog,' is starting to appear in technical and business glossaries on the Web, and one of the original bloggers, Rebecca Blood, has just published 'The Weblog Handbook,' one of the first books devoted to blogs. Even the decidedly unhip William Safire wrote about blogs in this week's New York Times Magazine, seemingly a sure sign that blogs have entered the orbit of the mainstream media."

Gross! "The crude word 'blog' itself suggests, by onomatopoeia, the verbal disgorging it denotes. Doesn't it just sound like a synonym for 'barf'? 'Oh, no, the dog just blogged all over the new rug!'"

Fight the Power, yo! "...[The] announcement of the first course about Weblogs this fall at the University of California at Berkeley's journalism school has been taken by some devotees as an apocalyptic sign that blogs are being co-opted by the Establishment. Conversely, Paul Grabowicz, one of the course's professors, told me yesterday by phone, that it's actually a sign that the academy has lost its mind. Either way, it is a sign of things to come."

The Tower of Blog: "How do words themselves, and our relationship with them, evolve with new technology? The danger of blogging is that the easy ability to do it ad infinitum means we stop caring about words themselves, and about the craft of writing."

Your name shall be... Blog-o-sphere, which is undergoing "a radical expansion... one that would include a contingent of—quick, bottoms up on the Red Bull—traditional journalists (the ones who write, as the lexicon has it, dead-tree pieces)."

Here come the journos! "The most popular bloggers build a sense of community by linking to each other and writing in a voice that cartwheels off the page, as a distinct alternative to what they see as the distant, establishment voice of newspaper journalists and others. Hence, the latest angst-filled question: Whither the blog-o-sphere, not to mention the future of the news media as we know it?"

Birth of a meme: "Blogs have 'achieved critical mass,' said David Weinberger, author of 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web' (Perseus, 2002). Most news organizations eventually will be forced to respond to the influence of the blog-o-sphere, predicted Weinberger, a technology commentator for National Public Radio's 'All Things Considered...' 'You can go with a well-researched, vetted, authoritative voice. Or you can find 50 voices [on a blog] that are wildly, hugely passionate, often one-sided and frequently wrong, but presenting a wider spectrum of viewpoints. That is frequently a better way of getting at the truth,' he said."

United we blog: On the day of the terrorist attacks, when masses of people logged on to the Internet for information... [bloggers] noted huge upswings in traffic to their sites and in e-mailed comments from the public... As a result, bloggers, who typically have day jobs, turned into 'do-it-yourself journalists... seeking out sources and sometimes assembling these ideas for others,' noted a study on Sept. 11 and the Internet released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project... In one chapter, Internet expert Alex Halavais noted that blogs often published first-person accounts of the terrorist attacks, some of which were compilations: 'Many of these accounts do not follow the canons in fact checking, seeking out alternative or opposing views, or attempted impartiality. They are necessarily more socially constructed, and read more like rumors...' Still, wrote Halavais, an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, 'growing numbers of Americans seem to want to supplement the material they get from traditional media.' And these days, universities and colleges are giving the blog-o-sphere the sort of widespread legitimacy that bloggers are so very fond of dissing."

Death of a party: "'Just when it was getting good,' wrote a reader on the Daily Pundit blog, 'the academics show up to suck the marrow from an infant art and bind its feet so that it limps about like some rich man's bride from China...' On the blog Slashdot, a reader bemoaned the change: 'For those of us old enough to remember, the [core] blog phenomenon could turn into an amusing rerun of the mainstreaming of sixties hippie culture by seventies marketing weenies.... We're gonna need a new buzzword pretty soon that means "painfully lame yet expertly produced synthetic blog."'"

Can't we all be friends? "[Paul] Grabowicz, who is co-teaching the [UC Berkeley's course on Weblogs] with Wired magazine co-founder John Battelle, said he understood, but doesn't agree with, the angst over the possible co-opting of the blog-o-sphere by major media. Instead, Grabowicz sees an expanded community populated by bloggers and by journalists applying the profession's basic principles of accuracy, fairness and integrity. 'The journalists can still do what journalists do in a Web log format and work with the people who are responding to that stuff [via an online airing],' said Grabowicz, '...Out of that comes maybe not a better story but a different story with hopefully more collective knowledge.'"