His chief complaint seems to be that just a handful of bloggers have sizeable audiences and, therefore, influence: just two blogs attract more than 1 million visitors daily. The figure drops after that, with the 10th-ranked getting around 120,000 visits and the 100th-ranked just 9,700 visitors. Compare this with a typical newspaper website attracting more than 1 million visitors a day and it is easy to conclude that blogs just do not hold sway.

Add to this the 27.2 million blogs in existence at the time Trevor wrote his story and 30.4 million as of yesterday. Who is reading when so many people are writing?

There is just too much 'noise' out there to sift through.

Also, he notes, not many bloggers can support themselves full time, and those who do parlay their popularity into book contracts and other lucrative deals with the MSM.

'Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave 'new economy' a few years ago?'

I would argue that yes, it is an information revolution; no, it will not drive MSM into oblivion (few bloggers argue this, and in any case MSM will evolve); and no, it is not a crock of virtual gold.

First, it is an information revolution in that blogs - and by this I mean text, photos, audio and video blogs - are adding to the internet content that does not exist in any form anywhere else.

Yes, a great number of blogs deal with the banal. See yesterday's Doonesbury, in which Zipper's idea for a compelling blog is to write about the Krispy Kreme doughnut of the month.

But some of the most valuable information on the planet today is not stored on any server or contained in any book. It is locked up inside the heads of millions of experts who have valuable life experiences, from selling real estate to foreigners in Thailand to hiking in the Himalayas to winemaking.

One way to get this information out into the open where it can be indexed and searched is through a blog.

Neither of these blogs probably attract many visitors - certainly nothing to rival the MSM - nor are they likely to make much money from Google's advertising programme. But this is not the point. Blogs are great for sharing your expertise, experience and passions. Whatever your fancy might be, there is probably a blog for it.

As for monetisation, the chances to make money are greater offline than online. Our Thai real estate expert might generate sales leads through her blog. Mr Wilson might find his next start-up to fund through his.

But if your passion is Abyssinian cats or Krispy Kreme doughnuts - the sort of thing my classmate might call banal - this is not to be discounted either. Blogs allow communities to form around a common interest, for the Roquefort lover in Hong Kong to find the Camembert lover in New York.

It is these highly focused communities that traditional media outlets - with their business models based on reaching mass audiences - are struggling to cope with. This is why Google worries MSM: the search engine has the ability to finely segment advertising down to very narrow interests. It is also why traditional media guy Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace.

So, yes Trevor, there is an information revolution, although not the type that will cause the Washington pundits to lose their jobs. Yet there is a fascinating World Wide Web of people out there, and they are connecting to each other through blogs.