Professional journalist-and-blogger Matthew Yglesias offers a few nice observations

about the what blogging is, and who bloggers are. I think it offers conside rable insight into the future of activists-as-bloggers, and more importantly, a n argument for why activists should write blogs.

At the end of the day, blogging is just a mode of presenting text (and, to som e extent, images) and a set of computer programs that make it easy to present t ext in that way. It’s not a method of doing things. The result, I think, is tha t the phenomenon of the “blogger” has no real future, though the phenomenon of the blog does. At the end of the day, Brad DeLong is an economist, Lawrence Sol um is a legal theorist, I’m a commentator, Jeralyn is a criminal justice expert , Laura Rozen is a national security reporter, etc. These are trades — areas o f competence, whatever — that we can all ply in a variety of media, print, web articles, blogs, academic papers (where appropriate), live or taped radio or t elevision interviews, etc. None of us are “bloggers” except in the sense that w e all write weblogs. But we also talk about this stuff to people and that doesn ‘t make us “talkers,” it’s a thing you do not a thing you are and, increasingly , it will be done by more-or-less the exact same group of people who are produc ing text in other formats.