Eugene Volokh, writing for The New York Times, on You Can Blog, but You Can't Hide
So the situation is a mess – and it's getting messier. Because of the Internet, anyone can be a journalist. Some so-called Weblogs – Internet-based opinion columns published by ordinary people – have hundreds of thousands of readers. I run a blog with more than 10,000 daily readers. We often publish news tips from friends or readers, some of which come with a condition of confidentiality.
The First Amendment can't give special rights to the established news media and not to upstart outlets like ours. Freedom of the press should apply to people equally, regardless of who they are, why they write or how popular they are.
Associated Press on 'Blog' most popular word on Web dictionary:
"Blog" is now the most popular search word in the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Its frequent lookup paralleled its growth on the political scene this year as keepers of Web logs aggressively chronicled campaign developments they thought were undercovered or ignored by traditional media.
Xiao Qiang, writing for New Scientist, on The 'Blog' Revolution Sweeps Across China:
It took a chance online encounter between a software engineer from Shanghai and a teacher in a remote province of China to start shaking up the power balance between the people and the government of the world’s most populous nation.
In August 2002, Isaac Mao, who worked at the Shanghai office of the chip maker Intel, was one of only a handful of people in China who had heard the word “blog”. A regular web surfer, he was fascinated by the freedom these online journals gave to ordinary people to publish both their own and their readers’ views online.