My own informal research suggests that many of the blogs run by communicators represent an attempt to establish a dialogue between haves and have-nots (or in some notable cases a monologue!): The blogger occupies an information niche, and his or her visitor is assumed to need expert guidance through it. The end result is rather like a consultant's shop window, complete with chatty shop-owner standing in the doorway. This kind of channel can of course be very useful for the information have-nots, but many of the haves are peddling much of the same stuff as every other consultant in the blogosphere. It will be interesting to see how many of these individually-branded platforms mature into spaces where original thoughts can be shared between the haves. Those that don't may end up losing their constituency - as information shoppers become more skilled they may desert their local 'corner-blogs' for the better located super-blogs which have faster and more direct access to new content and ideas.

In a post from Nov 15, I recounted the tale of how a well-known broadsheet critic has acquired his own personal online detractor. B.L. Ochman also picked up on this story a couple of days ago, suggesting that blogs have the potential to provide checks and balances for big-name critics of all kinds. Of course, such pairings of mainstream commentators with mirror-image bloggelgangers are going to be less common in the future than old media writers that become more blog-like in tone and platform. Consequently the 'official' view and the opinion of consumers will no longer tend to be located at different hubs on the Web. Imagine a restaurant or film critic's blog that blended their own with comments from both customers and fellow critics.