Strikes me that to fully, and reasonably fairly, redeem blogs, we need to come to see a lot of conventionally published material as super-ego censored--safe, acceptable, and therefore increasingly unacceptable/unsatisifying to a society that is beginning to once again see and appreciate the virtue in the free-ranged. Making it seem akin to a comfort call to mom, may not do much to establish its legitimacy. (What do you do for a living? I blog--its not the NYT, but it means my mom and I never fall out of touch, which is also why I like facebook so much.)

Blogs, yes. They're a conversation, a weird hybrid of solo journalism, op-ed piece without the 600 word limit of a newspaper column, conversation, and public soapbox.

But what about the novel? I'm curious to see how this do-it-yourself model applies to the novel. Or even to the nonfiction book.

I love a good read. My house is full of books. I also have my own unfinished novel in the drawer that I've been pecking away at for years. I've participated in enough writers conferences, critique groups, classes, and the like to truly understand what every instructor teaches in every creative writing class--getting good enough to be published is a long, hard slog of many years. Most of what publishers and agents get is crap. Most writers write crap for a long time. OK, it's not really crap, but they're practice pieces, the equivalent of a classical musician's years of scales, etudes, and student performances before reaching Carnegie Hall.

The only one who can't see their work as a student effort is the writer herself, who of course assumes she's just penned the next Great American Novel. He or she has done the work of years. It's impossible to see that work impartially.

The publishers do two things for me as a reader.

1. They sort out the practice pieces from the truly good, so I don't have to.

2. They edit. Even great writers need an editor.

3. They put it in a form so I can get it easily, be it traditional book, Sony e-reader, Amazon Kindle, what-have-you. This also includes marketing and distribution, so the author can spend her time writing the next book, not selling books.

4. They make sure the author gets paid, so that he or she will write another.

I still have yet to see how this might happen on the web. Maybe in the as-yet undeveloped iTunes for books? I don't think the technology is there yet. Even the Kindle is too cumbersome and too expensive.

Well if you count lowering the bar, yeah.

Most blogs are also not very interesting. Most bloggers have experiences that are very much like everyone else's, and they lack the storytelling skills to make these mundane experiences seem compelling.

But it's somehow enough that we share and acknowledge whatever it is that the blogger is talking about, however banal that may be.

And so we are all left holding up bic lighters in a huge arena, swaying to the music and checking each other out...only nobody is performing.

Barry Diller the guy who brought the Home Shopping Network to cable?

Hum, I bought my first Mac Power Book in 1993, glad I was ahead of Diller, though I'd probably refuse to cooperate with a Tina Brown edited New Yorker Profile--not that I've ever had the chance.

Today's NYTimes column by Frank Rich is what liberal blogs have been saying for months now about the sleaze balls running the Investment Banks, the Treasury Dept, and the Fed: their theft is a much more serious crime than Madoff's--Rich and the Times lose to the blogs.

"Each blog," James Wolcott wrote in 2002, "is like a blinking neuron in the circuitry of an emerging, chatterbox superbrain." This striking image cuts two ways. It's alluring to think you might be participating in a grand barn-raising for species-wide consciousness via the Web. It's creepy, too: What if doing so costs you some part of your separate identity -- what Nicholas Carr calls a "loss of selfness," a feeling of "slowly being emptied," a sense that "we are beginning to blur at the edges"?

That's just silly. You'll no more be blurred at the edges by blogs than by any other sort of human interaction, whether mediated by technology or not.

By the way, I loved Dreaming In Code. I'm a software engineer myself, and think you captured the spirit of the profession quite well.

I remember been told as far back as the Jetsons that the computer would "change everything". I kind of gather that when a group of business people start blowing their own horn about, "changing everything" they are probably in some kind of trouble. I remember hearing otherwise reasonable people once claim that "Amway products direct marketing" had "changed everything". Now even the damned blogs have "changed everything".

Heroditus observed 2000 years ago that. "The more things change the more they remain the same."

The news has no audience now not because, "everything has changed" but precisley because nothing has changed. Dispair follows on social economic and political entropy like night upon day. After a time it ceases to matter what anyone says about a state of affairs that demoralizes but never changes. Ironicly enough, this still sounds like news.

OK, I spent enough years writing headlines myself that I am loath to make too big a deal about this. But for grmorrison and anyone else who wants to argue that blogs didn't really change everything, let me just say this once:

Of course I think blogs are hugely significant or I wouldn't have spent the last couple of years of my life researching and writing about them. But "Say Everything" does not include the statement "blogs changed everything," nor does it make that argument in other words. Because, really, I don't believe that blogs have changed everything -- just a lot of things.

So if you want to pick an argument with the headline, be my guest. But it might be more fun to read the article itself (or even the book, if you feel like it) and argue with that instead!