I read a Mother Jones piece by George Packer on blogging, and although I think it really is more about political blogging, rather than blogging in general, I find myself being partially persuaded by Packer's characterizations, but not his conclusions:

George Packer

[from The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged]

The style of thickly descriptive storytelling, based on heavy reporting, immersed readers in the arc of an election year, achieving a sense of unity between the protagonists and the spectators, so that the campaign seemed to involve the whole of American society in the theatrics.

Blogs, by contrast, are atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant. They lack the continuity, reach, and depth to turn an election into a story. When one of the best of the bloggers, Joshua Micah Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com, brought his laptop to New Hampshire and tried to cover the race in the more traditional manner, the results were less than satisfying; his posts failed to convey the atmosphere of those remarkable days between Iowa and the first primary. Marshall couldn't turn his gift for parsing the news of the moment to the more patient task of turning reportage into scenes and characters so that the candidates and the voters take life online. He didn't function as a reporter; there was, as there often is with blogs, too much description of where he was sitting, what he was thinking, who'd just walked into the room, as if the enclosed space in which bloggers carry out their work had followed Marshall to New Hampshire and kept him encased in its bubble. He might as well have been writing from his apartment in Washington. But the failure wasn't personal; this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis. Blogs remain private, written in the language and tone of knowingness, insider shorthand, instant mastery. Read them enough and any subject will go dead.

I also think that Packer is right: blogs are indeed "atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant" and those are characteristics that typify successful media of our time. However, traditional journalism attempts to dissociate the author from the story. The pre-Heisenburg notion of an impartial, fact-finding, objective journalist who merely transcribes as history unfolds -- that idea is gone, or at least going.

While all experience of the world is private (until shared, at least), I don't believe we are trapped to find only stunted and insular insights in blogland. The form factor of blogging is shortish snippets, as opposed to longer pieces, and to gain a sense of the writer's mastery requires more of the reader than traditional journalism: the reader must return, and read again, and again, perhaps, to understand what the writer is up to. It is a serialized experience, and hoping that it could be condensed or smoothed into something else, smoothing into something more conventional means you are missing the point.

At any rate, no doubt about it, the revolution will be blogged, whatever revolution you may be thinking of. I guess in this case, the implicit argument is that the failure -- if that's what it is -- of Dean's populist revolt should be laid at the feet of the bloggers and the emergent democracy vanguard.

What may be missing from Packer's thinking is the participatory and involving aspect of most blogs -- something that is missed, or glossed over, if you apprach them with the eyes of a traditional reader. Every blog implies a community of readers, and their involvement -- to the degree that it jumps out -- changes the experience of reading totally, turning what may be thought of as "atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant" into something else entirely.