The Blog Revolution?

Does anyone else think we are in the middle of “The Blog Revolution”? I certainly think its happening right before our very eyes. Not convinced? Consider these facts:

• The Democratic National Convention, which ends tomorrow, has sparked a huge blogging community.
• CNN recently teamed up with Technorati to launch the Technorati Politics site to monitor the convention in real-time.
• MSNBC has a blogger, the Associated Press has three, CNN hosts a multi-headed blog. Is that enough mainstream media adoption for you?
• Bloggers actually got credentials for this year’s convention.
• Glenn Reynolds (one of the most read bloggers around) was on CNN to talk weblogs and politics.

Okay so I think that’s proof enough that weblogs are moving into the mainstream. But how about one more tidbit? Ignoring Blogger.com and some other sites, as well as personally hosted sites, the latest estimates peg the number of blogs at over 4 million, 1.4 million of which are said to be active (updated on average every two weeks). Predictions expect the number of hosted blogs to exceed 10 million by the end of 2004.

So thats good, lots of blogs are being created by “average” people. At the same time, we are seeing the mainstream media adopt blogs, as well as companies like Microsoft. So I suppose the queston is – is that good for the blogosphere? Will the mainstream media attempt to “monopolize” the blogosphere like they have traditional media? (If I published a newspaper, you’d believe the Journal over me – in fact you’d likely ignore my newspaper altogether).

I just hope this revolution and spotlight on the adoption of weblogs doesn’t spell the end for simple, fast, and powerful personal publishing. In many ways, I think weblogs are our last hope for keeping the media honest!