For good and for worse, where has it brought us? Dan Farber runs into Dave Winer, who has been blogging for ten years come April, and reflects on the massive changes blogging has wrought to all fields of communication (at least in the US, in Europe, and especially Scandinavia, there is still some, if not a long, way to go). He dwells on the virtues of its democraticizing force as well as what some would call its vices: a forthcoming book by Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur, will argue that unfettered blogging and social media is a kind of curse on culture, threatening the quality of public discourse, stifling creativity and encouraging plagiarism and intellectual property theft. But, Farber concludes:

The genie is out of the bottle. It's not a battle to the death of mainstream media versus the blogosphere. Over time, better filters and search mechanisms; measures of authority and trust; and natural selection will improve the noise to signal ratio, potentially for every individual's preferences, and change perceptions about what constitutes mainstream media.

(via Dave Winer, who's not impressed (update 27/2) by Andrew Keen's new book, saying Keen blames bloggers for the the demise of professional media, without considering that blogging might be an attempt to solve some of the problems caused by a vacuum of responsible high-integrity journalism).