Donald Sensing only responded to one point I made when he linked my blog post about group blogging on Winds of Change. I still stand by my past assertion that group blogging keeps people somewhere between the dregs of blogging on MySpace and actual, bonafide new media services such as WorldNetDaily.com. The reason I am confident that this will be so for quite some time is that blogging is pretty much by design an amateur format. It lacks the je ne sais qua that reading a column at TCSDaily.com or Reason.com has. This might change in a generation, but I have major doubts as to how far blogging can go right now in terms of really replacing any of the functions that even sites like the aforementioned have. Blogolutionaries tend to forget that even if sites like Reason.com have somewhat smaller readerships than Windows of Change, Instapundit, Wonkette, etc. that some of them have an even more influential readership than the big blogs.

It's also getting to be about time to separate video blogging and podcasting from blogging. They are deviations from what blogging is about. They are inherently uni-directional and are more like old media converted over to the Internet than a major new way for bloggers to get heard. If anything, they are the ones most likely to be coopted by the mainstream media because they will prove to be the most profitable. I think it's safe to say that most libertarian bloggers, for example, would much rather listen to a Reason.com podcast than an Instapundit or a QandO podcast. A video service-sorry, blog-would be even more popular if done right.

And that's just it, the people who think that these formats are the future grossly underestimate the costs of getting popular. Bandwidth is still expensive for John Q. Citizen. The sort of constant advertising that would have to go into video blogging would make it resemble an amateurish production of a regular television show, not the sort of drudge-like goodness of text blogging. For a regular video blog, let's look at some stats. Say that the blogger can get twenty minutes of good video in at 512kb/minute. That's 10MB right there. If they get only 100 viewers everyday, that's 1GB of bandwidth every day for about 30GB of bandwidth every month. Not too bad, but let's say that they get 1,000 viewers everyday. Suddenly they're up to 300GB of bandwidth every month, and that's not something that any hosting service is going to be happy about. I hope for the blogger's sake that they are making money hand-over-fist in advertising to pay for their costs because once they reach several thousand viewers a day, they'll be buying bandwidth in the low terabytes. Hence why I see the format getting coopted by those with enough established power and money to make it really work right off the bat.

Lastly, I think that the political bloggers are the ones who are mostly out of touch on this issue. Religious bloggers, geek bloggers and others are not really moving in the same direction because politics is a unique animal among bloggers. There is only so much room for partisan politics, so naturally there is going to be a lot of squeezing out of smaller bloggers in the political blogosphere, but I don't see that happening with the other parts because they operate on different wavelengths. I, for example, am a geek and civil liberties blogger, not a bonafide political blogger. I'm not competing to be the next Weekly Standard or National Review, but Winds of Change and Hot Air are.