Much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments is occuring over the results of Nielsen's study, indicating, among other metrics, that nearly two-thirds of people who have visited a blog don't know what a blog is. Not meaning to sound smug, but the results make perfect sense and I'm not a bit surprised. Blogging, as a defined publishing genre, has always been more important to bloggers than to blog readers. The value of blogging software is primarily that it offers an easy way to update Websites. As such, it is in improvement over the traditional HTML/FTP creation and building process. But visitors have no reason to notice that aministrative advantage. To them, a blog is just another frequently updated Web site. Personal publishing not new; news publishing is not new; and the merger of the two as a genre isn't tectonic enough to distinguish itself in the minds of readers. The fact that MSM distributes its content via RSS further muddies the distinction between news sites and blogs.

Bloggers: Get over it. Blogging is of great value to us, because it simplifies back-end databasing that we are too inept to master without a friendly front end. But to our visitors, the term "blog" needn't have any particular meaning. Better for the industry, in fact, that it doesn't, because it keeps the focus on content quality. The Weblog, as a genre, should not benefit from any special perception, and it shouldn't enjoy any privileged latitude. Blogging platforms give us the means to stay as current as the maintream media sites. Now it's up to us to be as insightful, articulate, and deserving of mainstream eyeballs.