Newsweek’s Steven Levy can almost always be trusted to get the story right, and his report on Weblogs is no exception: “…the bigger story is what’s happening on the 490,000-plus Weblogs that few people see: they make up the vast dark matter of the Blog-osphere, and portend a future where blogs behave like such previous breakthroughs as desktop publishing, presentation software and instant messaging, and become a nonremarkable part of our lives.”

Dave Winer recently pointed to this essay by Meg Hourihan, “What we do when we blog,” which contests the notion that blogging is exclusively a phenomenon associated with political debate or post-9/11 “war” commentary. Hourihan — one of the original folks behind Pyra, the company that brought Blogger into the world — writes thoughtfully on the subject, pointing out that the reverse-chronological structure of blogs can be, and is, a vehicle for any topic imaginable.

One line really jumped out at me:

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of “page”), an author can now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog’s post unit liberates the writer from word count.

I spent years writing overnight theater reviews for the San Francisco Examiner to an exact word count (we’d agree on a number of column-inches the day before, and then I had to fill that space precisely, or write short, unless I wanted to risk having the review chopped to fit “on the flat” by a late-night copy editor’s x-acto knife). Moving to the Web in 1995, I already felt “liberated from word count” — my stories could now fill as little or as much room on the Web page as they demanded. The constraint was now not room on a piece of paper, but rather the reader’s attention span.

This is a writer’s paradise. It can also be a reader’s hell. Word count is a discipline as well as a yoke. It forces writers to make choices; deciding what to leave out is as or more important than deciding what to put in. The discipline may matter less when one is writing for an intimate few than for a mass audience, but it remains central to effective writing. When everyone is liberated from word count, who will read the ensuing torrent of verbiage?

Maybe, of course, it doesn’t matter: A blog with only a handful of readers has succeeded as long as they’re the readers the writer cares about — and who care about what the writer is saying.

Howard Kurtz says bloggers help keep big media honest by exposing errors and analyzing bias. I agree: ” To lazy reporters, the world of blogs represents their worst nightmare: It’s an endless parade of experts in every conceivable subject they might write about, all equipped with Internet-style megaphones ready to pounce on errors.”

Trouble is, every time someone points this out, many journalists — instead of welcoming the chance to improve their profession — get defensive and think that their paychecks are being jeopardized. This us vs. them mentality gets us nowhere.

Here’s my take, from May 1999:

The emergence of weblogs doesn’t eclipse the importance of timely news and entertainment on the Web — if anything, it enhances the value of such original content. Mostly, it’s a sign that we’re only beginning to discover the best tools and strategies for helping Web users cope with the vast media terrain we all now inhabit. The webloggers have found a new and fertile niche in the Web’s information ecology. They’re fulfilling the predictions by Internet visionaries of the rise of a new breed of personal journalism online — only instead of pounding the physical pavement, they forage for news on the Net itself.

Blogs have become an Internet trend story — probably because there are so few other Internet trends right now, and most of those are too depressing to dwell on. Trend stories work best when reporters can drum up some conflict. Thus we have the War between the Bloggers and the Journalists.

It’s not much of a fight. Proponents of blogging every now and then display some of the old “We will conquer the world” spirit that drove so many Internet visionaries. That presses some journalists’ buttons, and they respond with reflexive dismissal and disdain. It’s like old times!

But aside from the occasional outburst of overheated rhetoric, there is no sensible reason for bloggers and journalists to have any particular animosity towards each other. The two enterprises are complementary.

I don’t believe blogging will kill off old-fashioned journalism any more than the continued success of Time and the New York Times will stop anyone from blogging. A reporter can (under the right circumstances) do things a blogger can’t — like spend months investigating a single story exposing, say, how big media companies got in bed with a bogus anti-drug ad campaign. (There’s nothing to stop a blogger from doing this, but I have yet to see it happen, and it’s unlikely to happen a lot, since most of us need to pay the rent somehow, and long-form investigative journalism takes too much time to do as an on-the-side thing.)

Conversely, bloggers can do things most reporters can’t — like updating at whim around the clock, or sitting in a conference hall posting comments directly to the Web. (Some professional journalists can do that, too.)

Bloggers can be journalists any time they practice journalism by actually trying to find out the truth about a story. A journalist can be a blogger by installing some blogging software and beginning to post. These words should be labels for activities, not badges of tribal fealty.

You’re reading one now. It’s a Web site with writing and links organized in reverse chronological order. Updated frequently. Usually written by one person. On anything under the sun.