The article then goes on about the sorts of people who keep blogs; claiming that "interesting people run interesting blogs, but it's remarkable how few of them there are". (Something quite possibly true, though isn't it just a restatement of Sturgeon's Law?)
Weblog software provides a wonderful tool that makes it easy to publish your thoughts and pictures to the world - should you lack immediate friends or family to whom you might want to mail these thoughts and pictures to first. The nutty blog hype, such as it is, has been inflated by a handful of weblog tools vendors and exhibitionists who desperately see this as their big moment. By promoting the humble blog as a social tool that heralds an "Emergent Democracy", or a fabulous network that can overthrow Big Brother, they're crowning themselves with the mantle of populist heroes.
Maybe we're all safer this way - thanks to weblogs. Maybe blogs are a way of keeping the truly antisocial out of harm's way. So if you know a middle-aged sociopath, for heaven's sake, point him to a computer and show him how to start a weblog.
Btw, I wonder what proportion of blogs are actually blogs (i.e., consist predominantly of linkage to things on the web), as opposed to news pages, journals, review sites and such.
Oh, Orlowski again. Duh.