All three, of course, and it just depends on the blog. There’s so much diversity among blogs, I can’t see how it’s even useful to treat them as one thing. How do you compare, for instance, a site like Daily Kos, which is basically a community driven activist site with something like Instapundit, which is basically Glenn Reynolds dishing out links with a sentence or two of commentary? And how do those compare with sites like Plastic or Slashdot, which are sort of like massive group blogs with editors picking the best user-submitted stories to post?

I agree with you that the “investigative” blogger is probably the most intriguing and potentially influential. Writers like Michael Totten and Michael Yon have really helped my understanding of what’s going on in Iraq. Of course, not everyone can afford to just fly to Iraq or Kosovo to do some reporting, but stuff like your Pacifica coverage brought a lot of local attention to an issue that might not have made the editor’s cut at the Register Guard or something.

So I guess you could say that I mostly disagree with the Quark Soup blogger. Sure there’s a lot of terrible blogs. But there’s a lot of great ones, too. It’s a medium that’s still stabilizing. Pining for the halcyon days of blogging (2003 - 2004) seems a bit silly.