The Financial Times has an article on blogging, in which they point out that, in the end, it doesn't really matter at all:

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

despite having been subjected, since joining my new company, to a wave of web 2.0 propaganda, I am still of the opinion that the FT is right. Blogging can be more, and occasionally is (witness, for example, when I filed a Freedom of Information Act claim to find out more about a chemical spill in my town), but the fact is if you don't know me, you don't know whether I'm reliable or not - and you probably aren't going to read someone for (is it three years I've been blogging?) just to get the one 'hard news' story they do. I think maybe once professional aggregators get more into the picture, we'll have something, though whether it will be the 'revolution' everyone wants to claim is coming is another question.

And, if there ever comes a time I'm blogging five times a day for fifty weeks out of the year, could y'all just fly down and beat me upside the head? Because I surely have better things to do with my time than that!

This begs the question, however: is getting "hard news" stories the purpose of blogging? Surely not every memoir read by the public is read for the purpose of finding out about the chemical spill in Ypsi (or fill in some other particularly important local news story here). I think FT is rather limiting in their idea of blogging's raison d'etre. Although Samuel Pepys is more interesting to old school historians when he writes about politics, social and cultural historians are much more excited when he talks about his dinner in bed with his sick wife. And, no, when I started referring to Pepys' Diary, I had no idea that someone had started typing it in in "blog" form...