Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine disputes validity and meaning of a statement made by Mena and Benn Trott during their talk at Blogtalk as reported by Jane Perrone on the Guardian blog. (There seem to be no permalinks to individual posts there so in my book it does not meet at least the minimal requirement for a blog.)

They were saying that the 1% of 'political pundit' weblogs distort the image ofwho bloggers are, when the reality is that 99% of bloggers are not writing about political issues and arguing about ideology, but writing about their personal lives...

I don't buy the numbers but this does raise an interesting and needed queston: How many blogs are intended for public consumption? How many are media and how many are communication? The number of media blogs will continue to grow but so will the disparity as this, the world's easiest publishing tool, is used for publishing anything, even shopping lists.

The fact that all these different uses are made of the same tool says nothing about any of those uses. That is, just because novelists and secretaries used typewriters, nobody assumed they were all writing when they typed. So it's meaningless to look at percentages of total blog tool use and draw conclusions. What will be meaningful is to separate media from communication and then look at how many there are, what traffic and audience they get, and what subjects they cover.

Exactly, blogs are tools. Even if 99% were kitty-blogs (a blog recording feeding of the author's cat as the highlight of his/her day), one effective blog is enough to demonstrate that it can be a potent tool put to other uses. And we have a lot more than one to show that.

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