Another pseudo debate about blogging

'When Andrew Keen attacks bloggers, saying, "No one wants to know what you had for breakfast," he's ignoring the fact that many bloggers are professional journalists, and many others come to the party perfectly well-equipped to promulgate an idea or construct an opinion. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has been published in Time; Duncan Black of Eschaton has a Ph.D. in Economics; Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos is an Army veteran, an accomplished pianist, and boasts a law degree from Boston College; libertarian Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit teaches law at Tennessee; Glenn Greenwald of Salon is a veteran constitutional lawyer; and conservative Atlantic Monthly blogger Andrew Sullivan is the former editor of the New Republic.'
http://www.napavalleyregister.com/articles/2007/09/25/columnists/calvin_ross/iq_4135639.txt

Linked to this from Instapundit. What I find strange about the 'debate' about blogs is that some bloggers feel the need to defend themselves from comments like 'No one wants to know what you had for breakfast'. By now, most people have worked out that of the 70 million blogs, at least 69 million are crap, and are no interest to anyone but the author and their immediate friends and family. You would notice the same sort of statistical pattern if you walked up to 70 million people and chatted with them for half an hour. But does that mean the 69 million people are ruining the internet? Thats ludicrous. Does that mean that the hundreds of thousands of really good, thoughtful, interesting blogs are discredited by the presence of the other 69 million? Also ludicrous. In fact, the whole 'debate' is ludicrous.

Would someone aver that all newspapers are crap because the Daily Sport exists? No, I don't imagine anyone has, or will. So why do we have to keep coming back to this psuedo-debate about whether all blogs are amateur rubbish that just distracts people from the superb, deeply thoughtful New York Times? A couple of years ago, I thought blogging was all teenage girls writing about the onset of an amazingly obvious zit and nerdy guys laying out in vast detail their latest conspiracy theory. But it isn't. And that should be obvious by now.