It’s bigger than you, it’s bigger than me, and the gestalt is bigger than the sum of the parts. That’s the blogosphere, and the nature of its content is so diverse you really can’t wrap a finger around it. Those who try end up missing the point:

I suppose Wonkette is a harbinger of things to come. Two years ago, only web nerds read blogs, and we were ridiculed by a somewhat nervous mainstream press. Then we acquired a sort of cachet. And Wonkette’s boss decided to buy his way in. She had instant publicity and therefore instant traffic, and her site looked enough like a blog to fool the stupid. Well, it worked, so now we should probably brace for a tide of similar prefab syntho-bloggers.

The appeal of blogging, initially, was that anyone who wanted to write could come here and put his work before the public. We didn’t have to wait for thick-headed or biased editors and agents to approve of our message. We slapped it on the page and waited to see who showed up. If we were good, we got hits. If we sucked, we didn’t. We didn’t compete with the big boys because we were in our own market. They bought eyeballs with advertising dollars. We did it with quality writing and link whoring.

I don’t know what’s worse. How Wonkette got here, or what she’s doing now that she has arrived.

Frankly, I no longer care about my traffic. I gave up link whoring a long time ago, because I realized blog congestion had created an environment in which there was no way to make this kind of website profitable. I see the ‘sphere as a place where I can make a few contacts, polish my writing, and get encouraging feedback from readers. So I don’t give a shit if I offend people who get a lot of traffic, and I don’t care who delinks me. And I’m telling you now, Wonkette stinks to high heaven.

— Steve H of Hog On Ice: Mr. Reagan Lifted the Iron Curtain, Miss Wonkette. What Have you Done?

John Hawkins calls him out and explains very very slowly why Wonkette works for our benefit as well:

There are two schools of thinking about the blogosphere. One school of thinking which Steve H. (and a lot of other people apparently subscribe too), says that there are a limited number of eyeballs out there and there and every time one set of them goes to look at Wonkette, that means some other blogger loses out. To a certain extent, this is true. The average reader can only hit so many pages in a day and if they add one blog to their regular reading list, that means they may not have the time to check out another blog.

However, I don’t look at it that way. In fact, I think people like Wonkette are great for blogging because they expand the blogosphere. Let me explain what I mean.

First, you’ve got to remember that percentage wise, we bloggers get out to a very small fraction of internet. For example, Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit, the first name most people on the right think of when they talk blogging, pulls a very hefty 74,946 visits per day according to his statistics tracker. On the other hand, Matt Drudge over at the Drudge Report, who’s probably the first person most people think about when you’re talking politics on the web, received 8,872,781 visits in the last 24 hours. So while there’s obviously a colossal number of people who are interested in reading about politics on the web, most of them have yet to discover blogs.

That’s why it’s fantastic that people like Ana Marie Cox at Wonkette are growing so big, so fast, with the help of contacts and mainstream media publicity. The more readers Ana Marie gets, the more people who are being introduced to the world of blogging for the first time.

– John Hawkins of Right-Wing News: Why People Like Wonkette & Michelle Malkin Are Good For The Blogosphere

I recall, in my less than two years of blogging, similar complaints from other, more personal bloggers. They’d complain about the memes and linkfests, the trackbombs and the link reciprocation. They’d complain about how the “petty fighting” among political bloggers “cheapened” the blogosphere.

It seems to me that the ones who complained back then, just as Steve is complaining today, have this idea on “how” the blogosphere’s content should be. There’s plenty of room in the internet for all of us, twice over. And though Wonkette may revel in her disrespect for Ronald Reagan, I’m sure we can trust her readers to be intelligent enough to digest her content without our help. Honestly, I don’t even know what Steve is really complaining about: whether it’s her disrespect of RR or the fact that she’s paid to produce bloggy smut.

Her bloggy smut does not represent all of us, and the more people get exposed to the blogosphere, the more people will dabble and try, and the more content — glorious content of all sorts of different forms — would come in. More blogs to link to and delink, more blogs to annoy us, enlighten us, and yes, more blogs that won’t even make it past their first month. And the less will her bloggy smut “cheapen” “all of us.”

Readership in the blogosphere is not a zero-sum game, and it’s not coming to that point just yet. Not even close.

(Hat tip: Big Media Michelle Malkin, who has had a blog for about a week now, about whch I am impressed.)