Your perspective on blogging and “real” writing is enlightening. From my side of the world I tend to resent being called a “blogger” because I’m not a writer. I’m a consultant. My profession is not one in which I’m paid for articles (in fact I’m usually asked to write for free), but one in which clients engage us for projects. So the blogs-to-riches path is more fraught with branding missteps, I think. When I meet someone at a conference who I’m considering a prospect and they refer to me as a “writer” I quietly freak out.

I also fear that among non-writer-professionals, “blogger” has a potentially negative implication - that you don’t actually DO anything, that you don’t practice what you go on about in your blog.

Maybe this isn’t a very useful comment since I’m talking about a totally different community of bloggers than what you’re writing about. Everyone who doesn’t care, ignore me!

Part of progress is all these new things being possible. And not just the technical ones, like googling and time travel, but expanding the notion of what we can skillfully do in a day.

I easily write 750 word pieces in an hour–granted, these are pieces with less research involved, but the content is useful, they’re fully formatted and linked within an inch of their column-inches and, I dare say, they are actually fun to read.

Do I still want there to be room for heavily researched, rewritten and edited content? Hells, yeah. But that hasn’t ever been the whole story. Ever. And I know it, b/c my grandfather, who got into the newspaper racket back in 1920, told me so. And yes, that’s just what he called it. And yes, he was also a radio man, an ad man and an any-other-kind-of-man he needed or wanted to be at the moment.

He would so have been a blogger if he’d lived that long.