Elizabeth Spiers writes

If Markoff thinks all (or even most) bloggers are keeping diaries online, then Jarvis is probably right: he doesn't read blogs—which seems ironic, given that he's the technology reporter for the Times

I find her quote puzzling. From what I've seen the average weblog is an online diary. In general weblogs take the form of diaries, commentaries, link collections or some combination thereof. The most common form is the online diary which can be confirmed by selecting any dozen blogs at random from the hundreds of thousands at Blogger, LiveJournal or Xanga and examining the writings. The fact of the matter is that for every blog that is enlightened commentary about technology or politics there are a dozen blogs by some high school girl complaining about pimples and boys.

I find it amusing that the "blogs will change everything" hype crowd try to deny this. That's like denying that for a long time the only way to make money on the World Wide Web was with pr0n or that the driving incentive for broadband is copyright infringement and pr0n. Let's not forget that lots of innovation on the Web was driven by pr0n sites.

The blogerati need to accept the fact that their medium of communication is also the favored way for teenage girls to carry on in the grand tradition of "Dear Diary". Remember , just because IRC is mainly the haven of script kiddies and w4r3z d00ds doesn't make it any less useful nor does the predominance of email forwards and spam make email a pointless technology. Blogs are the same way.