2. How has this profoundly altered the blogging landscape?

Funny thing about rags to riches stories, someone always ends up with the riches and everyone else gets rags. I think the dawn of this new medium has had a profound effect on everyone who is now sitting at their desks thinking about spinning out a “web log.” Since so many people have found success, it has driven the number of blogs to mind boggling levels. Unfortunately, we just can’t read it all. That means that for most people, blogs that might have done incredibly well five years ago just aren’t good enough anymore.

Either the idea has already been done to death (e.g. funny pictures with captions) or they can’t build it out to scale fast enough to make a dent in the audience of those who came before. The Internet, in a lot of ways, is a winner takes all sort of enterprise with the winners appearing quickly, growing quickly and gobbling down a ton of the market share in their wake. The downside is that these days, the odds of you ending up with a blockbuster blog are nearly nil but those who do are usually doing something pretty interesting.