From this article:

...blogging is a solitary activity that requires the blogger to spend less time reading a book, taking the dog for the walk, meeting friends in the pub, seeing a movie, or reading to the kids. The reason that 99.93 per cent of the world doesn't blog, and never will, is because people make simple information choices in what they choose to ingest and produce, and most of this will be either personal and private, or truly social. Blog-evangelists can fulminate at the injustice of this all they like, but people are pretty smart and make fairly rational choices on the information they process.

Interesting people run interesting blogs, but it's remarkable how few of them there are.

So the upshot of all this is it that not withstanding the gems of self-publishing - largely unsung by the A-list evangelists because they refuse to conform to the canon (Cryptome and Indymedia are not considered part of the club, for example) - the field is largely populated by adolescents - of all ages.

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...

As I posted here:

I've been blogging for years. It was just known as posting to Usenet or putting up a page at my site. [for instance, Dave Winer linked to my "Why 100% Pure Java is a Crock" essay here. Back then, his site was just a daily journal, a compendium of links. Now it's called a "blog." And, I've written well over a thousand Usenet messages. Just searching for one email address I used and in one group comes up with 494 messages.]

Now I have this nifty program (even if it's Perl) that lets me categorize by date and subject, and a support structure of potential readers and potential linkers.

As far as the 12-year-old girls are concerned, there are a lot of crappy daily journal blogs out there. Many of them from chatgirls who have cascading hearts on their entries, or who post pictures of their cats. Unless they also post pictures of themselves (or their boobies), I just ignore them.

While I started my blog making fun of other blogs and blogging (having imaginary chats with second-string tennis star Iroda Tulyanova, for instance), I soon started concentrating on politics. My blog doesn't get that many readers, but hopefully one of these days something I write about will filter up the blogosphere and into the "real" world. I think my coverage of the "peace" protests might have done that to a certain extent; I was showing what was really on their posters, when the "real" news outlets wouldn't show the swastikas and the Shrub-Administration-as-Nazis tableaux. Sully linked to one of my pics, and I think that might have helped unmask the protesters a bit.