Wasn't a reader of your blog at the time, so it was good fun to read that other blog post (Down Goes Brown, Black Dog Hates Skunk, Five Hole Fanatics and Lions in Winter are staples of my RSS reader. You are too.)

"I have, in the past, been critical of amateur bloggers following pro sports teams. Particularly in the wake of the success of my employer's Habs Inside/Out website, I just couldn't fathom how people without access to the team and with daily jobs that might affect their posting schedule could ever really hope to compete for news. Even analysis, it seems, hasn't been very convincing (though people talking out of their ass about what players the Canadiens should sign and what lines they should put them on is a problem in just about every medium)."

That debate is dead, and I know I'm threadjacking, but I can't help it. Also, I understand I'm just a blogger talking out of my ass.

The thing is, I don't think "competing with news" is always that big a part of the equation. I mean, some networks/big sites actually pretend taking on the traditional media (until they get a job in those, that is...) and many bloggers actually see themselves as part of a larger mediatic ecosystem (in which they hope to find a stable employer, a newspaper maybe?), but more often than else, I'd defer to a definition of blogs forwarded by Andrew Sullivan somwhere this summer...

Basically, blogs are the contemporary equivalent of self-published books. You got something you feel like writing about, you feel like turning a soapbox over, stand on it and say what you have on your mind. So you start a blog. The cost of entry is minimal (whatever time you feel like throwing at it, that's it, that's all), and you cut it off whenever you feel like. I know I keep plugging stuff on my blog because it leads me to do discovering interesting stuff that can then be passed along to other people interested in that kind of stuff.

(No, not that kind of stuff you pervert; I track the habs scoring chances for the season; I guess I should be covering amateur sports, but the trouble is, I don't give a fuck about amateur sports. I'm a bad person, I know)

My point is, doing something is often worth it because you can share the results with people who'll pick them up and keep the ball rolling on their side. Blogs are a tremendously empowering medium when you want to do that. And it's the root of the whole thing, no? Dave Winer (I know he didn't invent blogs, but he was in the middle of a bunch of stuff at the times) and others in the early 90's were all on a level or another in the publishing industry (as in: automating QuarkPress tasks and coordinating work between people linked together trough computer networks), and I find it fascinating that nowadays blogs, mass publishing engines that they are, have slided toward a "media", aka "news" phenomenon. Mind you, I don't blame the media; it seems a bunch of people who wanted in on the Mainstream Media action used blog as some kind of trojan horse. I guess cheap advertising rates helped too.