that's their best attack?

One of the slurs against bloggers is that this is really diary writing.

Of course, the media pros are trying to conjure up images of giggling teens writing down stupid things in little books stored under their pillows.

But frankly, I think that journals and diaries have provided us with incomparable windows on the past as folk wrote down thoughts, observations, impressions on life as they experienced it. Are they always accurate? No. Historians have other methods to defend the accuracy of their facts. But they are human.

Sometime in the mid-20th century, when letter writing died out, we entered a period when people quit writing about themselves, about the people around them, about life. We are poorer because of this. Perhaps we became so narcotized by television, that we sat in a stupor each evening, lacking any thoughts.

Back when three television networks and a few hundred newspapers controlled most news coverage, media folk reverently talked about their responsibility to provide a marketplace of ideas. At the time, we didn't realize the paucity of that marketplace with its small number of vendors.

Now, the messy world of the internet allows for all kinds of folk to express what they think, what they support, what they dislike, what they are curious about. And blogs, many which are diaries, are a record of our lives, our silly, interesting, dull, possible and realized lives.