The BBC also did a section in its year-in-review on blogs. I use the story as an opportunity to do some opining of my own.

First things first. The last two paragraphs of the BBC story might well be the most salient:

In any case, as bloggers rarely go out and about, many of those who comment on the world at large get their information from mainstream news sources. But the relationship is increasingly symbiotic: journalists for their part increasingly use blogs as a barometer for how much coverage a topic deserves - however dismissive they may sound of the burgeoning number of modern Samuel Pepys.

Nonetheless, hacks remain safe in their jobs for the time being. The number of people reading even the most influential online diarists is tiny - the top political blog receives just 0.0051% of all net visits, according to figures from web influence ranking firm HitWise released this year.

Now, if you're as ignorant as British history as I am, you might find yourself wondering who the hell Samuel Pepys was. Here's a biography.

Back in the 17th century, he was a English diarist -- but if there were computers and an Internet back then, I'm sure he would have been a blogger. :)

If you're looking for tips on "how to write a blog they'll read in 100 years," check out this article by the Culture Commotion project.

Here's the closing graf from it:

Once you have performed your Pepys scrutiny, burn it on a CD or DVD and send one copy to the youngest responsible member of your family, with careful instructions that they are to do the same in 20 years. Send the other to the Smithsonian. CxC will attempt to encourage them to take receipt of it and put it in an archive somewhere. Congratulations, you are now immortal.

Final word on the BBC review

It's true that blogs aren't a mass medium yet. And it's equally true that they, for the most part, aren't commercially successful yet. There aren't many people who've been able to give up their day jobs while blogging on politics or related subject matter.

But they are being read -- in some cases, quite intensively -- by people who are actually involved in politics. And it takes a relatively small, activist group to have influence when so many are largely apathetic.

In fact, in some areas of media criticism, for example, one could argue blogs are disproprationately influential -- they are a weapon of asymmetrical info-warfare.

One disadvantage the U.S. liberals seem to find themselves at is they can't seem to duplicate the "echo chamber" effect of the U.S. conservative media, in which "stories" move from blogs to conservative broadcast media and then the mainstream (one reason is there isn't much liberal media in the U.S.; that's one reason why Air America Radio was started). However, that might be generally true, there are exceptions to the rule.

Here's an excerpt from a New Yorker article on ABCnews.com's The Note. It's about the remarks by Sen. Trent Lott at a 2002 dinner honouring one-time segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond that appeared to endorse segregationist views. The story initially went nowhere:

Then, on December 6th, Halperin highlighted the remarks in The Note. Within hours, Talking Points Memo, a liberal blog written by Joshua Micah Marshall, and Tapped, a blog put out by the left-leaning magazine The American Prospect, picked up the story. Crediting The Note, Tapped wrote, “What about the national media? . . . Trent Lott, soon to be the Senate’s majority leader, is caught on tape reminiscing fondly about a segregationist presidential campaign, and we hear nothing (although, since The Note is read widely, that might change).” Indeed, it soon did. That night, James Carville, the Democratic strategist, criticized Lott’s comments on “Crossfire.” Tom Edsall, a Washington Post reporter, also spotted Lott’s remarks in The Note. “I saw it in cold print, and it really stood out,” he said. “That’s when I got the sense that this deserved significant coverage.” Meanwhile, more and more bloggers began to quote Lott’s statement, while decrying the “old,” print-based media for its silence. The Drudge Report, which had helped establish the Internet as a new form of political grapevine during the Monica Lewinsky affair, also started to promote the story. As the scandal spread to all the major newspapers and cable channels, The Note collected items from these other outlets, which it posted on its site, thereby spreading the story further. On December 13th, under the headline “Never Like(d) Him: Lott Has a Gang of 200 Problem,” The Note crystallized how quickly sentiment in the political and media establishment had shifted:

First, our extrapolated survey of the Gang of 200—Al and Judy, Ben and Sally, and the rest of the Chattering Class elite (yes, even the media and political elite have an elite) who will be gathering at holiday festivities over the next several days—suggests that 90 percent of them think he will be forced out as leader, and 59 percent of them seem to think he should be.

Two weeks after The Note posted its story, Lott relinquished his leadership post. Halperin’s item was acknowledged as having incited what the New York Post called “The Internet’s First Scalp.” Most political strategists and reporters told me that that is the real power of The Note: a single item on its site can metastasize until it is picked up by more traditional media. Mickey Kaus, the author of Kausfiles, one of the first political blogs, once asked rhetorically, “If a tree falls in the forest, and The Note doesn’t cover it . . . does it make a sound?”

In the New Yorker piece, it was argued The Note doesn't really have an ideological agenda. Its guru, Mark Halperin, is all about the game of politics. Lott made a gaffe, and Halperin helped turn it into a career-ending one. Liberal, conservative, it doesn't matter.

And he did it with a small but influential readership (Halperin has said he writes The Note for the Club of 500; the people he identifies as being at the centre of American political life).

I still think U.S. conservatives have been more agile at using the Internet to further their agenda and attack the liberal one.

In this country, however, I think blogs are even further off the radar.

Two of the highest-profile political bloggers -- Paul Wells and Andrew Coyne -- are longtime members of the MSM.

I'm trying hard to think of a Canadian story this year where blogs helped to push something onto the news agenda -- either from the left or the right -- and I'm shooting blanks.

Can anyone help out?

Maybe we'll see a further flowering of blogs in 2005, but I so far, we haven't seen any strong, independent, influential voices emerge way up here in Soviet Canuckistan.