Is blogging 'revolution' oversold?

"What's in a name? That which we call a blog / By any other word would smell as sweet." -- with apologies to Shakespeare

Just when I get started blogging, along comes Simon Dumenco, media columnist for AdAge.com and the print edition of Advertising Age, and tells me there's no such thing.

Dumenco has a thought-provoking column in the current issue of AdAge.com, titled "A Blogger is Just a Writer With a Cooler Name." His point: Good writing is good writing, no matter what its platform is:

It’s just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

OK, you might argue, blogging is aesthetically a different beast -- it’s instantaneous media. (Well, since the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, pretty much all media has had to learn how to be instantaneous.) It’s unpolished. (The best blogs I read are as sophisticated as anything old-school media publishes.) It’s voice-y. (The best old-school media I read tends to be voice-y.) It’s about opinion, not reporting. (The best reporting to come out of MacWorld in San Francisco last week was published on blogs.) It’s, well, often sloppy and reckless (and Judy Miller wasn’t?). [Parentheses in the original.]

Judy Miller, of course, was the New York Times reporter who got snookered so badly by the Bush administration's propoganda about WMDs in Iraq ... hardly a poster child for the traditional, "dead-tree" media.

I'm not sure I agree 100 percent. I still think there's something different about the way people write in a blog, and there's something in the medium that helps make it happen that way. I'm not sure what. One of the reasons I started a blog was so maybe I can find out. But Dumenco has a good an excellent point. And web publication is still publication.