Now if the insignificant events in the daily life of celebrity blonde Anna Nicole Smith are worth recording and distributing to the world by cable--and the E! Cable Network thinks they are--then the sight of blogger Jane Smith recording the ordinary facts of her life, and distributing them via the Web, should strike us, not as a strange development in the life of media forms, or one to laugh at, but a far more sensible notion all around. Anna's show is the bizarre form. Jane's journal is a more natural--and a more democratic--thing to do.

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Jay Rosen is chair of the Journalism Department at New York University. His weblog is PressThink.

James W. Carey, The Struggle Against Forgetting.

Dave Winer, What Makes a Weblog a Weblog?

Andrew Sullivan, A Blogger Manifesto

For a more academic perspective, I recommend Tim Dunlop, If You Build It They Will Come: Blogging and the New Citizenship.

Also see PressThink: Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds.

Harvard's Kennedy School does a very useful case study, Big Media Meets the Bloggers.