So this raises the question, is blogging going mainstream, and if so, how do bloggers feel about it? The answers seem to be "yes" and "bad," with asterisks by both. First, it's impossible to announce precisely when something as amorphous as blogging has Arrived (I suppose my article in the Tribune could be seen as the day newspapers co-opted blogging, and no doubt wails of protest will echo around the Web), and besides, even if the Trib and every "establishment" media institution or college syllabus got its claws on blogging, there would still be hundreds of thousands (and soon millions) of personal journals on the Web that would never be widely read, that would still feel as organic and small as the day in 1999 when Blogger.com launched. Ironically, the more the Tribune talks about blogging, the less fringe it may feel but the more diverse it will be--as people who wouldn't have encountered blogging on their own find out about it from traditional sources, and add a different twist to the blogosphere. So on the second question of how bloggers feel about this, we must consider that diversity was the point to begin with, so for blogging to leap its techno-subculture walls is a step forward.

Still, the San Fransisco Chronicle will raise the issue of whether blogging is being "co-opted." Others, like Wired magazine ("Blogging Goes Legit, Sort Of"), have as well--all fixated on the fact that a UC-Berkely course this fall will cover weblogs. There are a lot of misunderstandings about this. More on this later, here are the articles for now:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/07/22/blogmain.DTL
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52992,00.html