opinion | David Weinberger |Boston Globe: “…blogging went mainstream. Most media outlets now feature less formal, more personal columns either by their official columnists or by a cadre of writers who can’t be fitted into the limited space of a print newspaper or magazine. Even so, when the media refer to “bloggers,” they often mean unschooled amateurs unaffiliated with respectable publications — people who are obsessed with the trivial, full of hate, and unfamiliar with spellcheck. Yet delve into almost any field of research and you’ll find webs of bloggers joined by their common interests, whether it’s cooking, policy, or contemporary philosophy. We bloggers are still there, connecting, learning from one another, and speaking in our own flawed human voices. The leading blogging site, WordPress.com, hosts 37 million of them, although not all are personal or still active. Tumblr claims 252 million blogs and 99 billion posts, mainly short form. We’re not noticed as much outside of our webs, and we are no longer considered a “phenomenon,” but we’re there. In fact, blogs now often are where the most interesting ideas are surfaced, argued, and appropriated into a discipline’s discourse. Unlike the output in scholarly journals and magazines, in these webs of blogs we get to see ideas emerging from conversation among people sharing what in the old days we’d take as early drafts. These webs allow participation by people regardless of credentials, enabling voices to rise to their own level of credibility…” [thanks to Bob Ambrogi – grateful to hear this message and share it via my Word Press blog – and also celebrate 13 years of blogging on beSpacific.]