I would suggest that the thought that people are learning to blog might also work in reverse: blogs are people learning to have voices, presence, in a literary medium. For many, this is their first adult experience of this sort of thing. Often these are the most interesting presences, whereas the allegedly professional "writers" demonstrably fail to comprehend even the most basic properties of the activity - for example, the fact that it involves links. Other industrial-strength pundits believe blogging rises to the level of being the next step in vanity sites. What one senses here is the pontification of ignorance filtered through long practice in knowing so much that it hurts. It takes time to appreciate the nuances of new things. I don't expect anyone fully has, but those of us who at least have tried it for a while could speak volumes more than the NY Times, Mr. AS, or Mr. Dv, or others who have kindly taken the trouble to inspect the goods in their hermetically sealed editorial chambers. One possible way to describe a good blog: journalism with the gloves off.