Andrew Sullivan wrote an essay about "The Blogging Phenomenon". If you're asking yourself "What IS this?", read it. And if you've read Andrew Sullivan recently, you know that he has as much resistance to new ideas as anyone. But even he's convinced:

"It's somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio. It's genuinely new. And it harnesses the web's real genius--its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It's a new medium finally finding a unique voice. Stay tuned as that voice gets louder and louder."