Weblogs can’t be doing too bad because the Washington Post Leslie Walker saw fit to bless them with faint praise:

While blogs are a significant publishing phenomenon, I see them as entirely different from professional news organizations, which have paid staffs that ferret out and vet information according to established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth. Blogs are more like a written conversation; they tend to be dominated by responses to what others are saying (links to other blogs) and what traditional media is reporting (links to online news stories).

Translation? “It’s okay guys, we’re safe.” If we can just get the New York Times to also have a Stewart Smalley moment at our expense, we’ll be set.

Another sign weblogs are transitioning in to the mainstream media is the evolution of a clear weblog pecking order, backed up with neato charts and graphs…

Author Clay Shirky finds the 80/20 principle at work: 20% of the group always end up with 80% of the power/money/pootie-tang. (I had always heard it as 20% always end up doing 80% of the work, so I guess I’ve been missing out some of those fringe benefits.)

Looking at Shirky’s list of the twenty top blogs, I recognized two of them and visit none. Even though I’m still a newbie blogger, that leads to believe that bloggers aren’t the ones visiting these top blogs. His work is pulled from Technorati, which tracks only 30,000 of the planet’s blogsites. (There must be something in the neighborhood of six or seven figures.)

His theory could hold, but at such an abstract level, what does it matter? Personal intent has to play a part in judging any site’s success. The vast majority of weblogs—of the “I like my dog” variety—are intended for only a small audience: the author, his wife, his best friend, and his mother (and his dog?). At the top of the heat are pseudo-blogs run by large web companies, blog software engines, blogs by established journalists (like Andrew Sullivan or Joe Conason), and a few stand-out Joe Six Pack bloggers.

The rest lie somewhere in between. The best of these (that I’ve found so far) are written for other interested bloggers. They’re not trying to be “professional jourrnalists” (journalism is a craft, not a profession, but that’s another post). They’re not even trying to be paid writers. They’re trying to create a civic space—an agora—on the web. Or even better, trying to create multiple, overlapping civic spaces. And what’s so bad about that?

The potential influence of this civic space is yet to be seen. Orson Scott Card’s Ender series imagines the first ruler of earth will have gotten his start on what we’d now recognize as a blog. (Nicely alluded to—and countered—by Demosthenes at Shadow of the Hegemon). There was a day when the net was considered an unreliable news source; now it’s the primary news source for millions. Could something similar happen with weblogs? Time will tell.