Blogs are just a simple content management system that you can use for anything, including journalism. Most, however, are not.

As for journalism having to support the journalist financially, I'm afraid I don't buy that. If you break an important story on your blog and don't get paid a penny for it, it could have the same social consequences as if you were paid.

Consider the pictures of the Hudson River plane crash first posted on Twitter. If a professional photojournalist had taken those pictures, he or she would have shopped them to the highest bidder in mainstream news organisations. The Twitter user didn't do this, but his picture still ended up all over the world.

This is a fundimental problem for those of us who make our living as journalists. People are willing to do (some parts of) our job for free. We can't just define this problem away by saying it's not journalism. We need to respond to it by finding our role in this radically changed media ecology.

Blogs are normally just riddled with links from journalists’ hard work. If it's journalism then the bloggers are parasites – and I don't mean that in a negative sense. They work well for opinion and conversation and debate – but journalism they ain't.

Unlike traditional journalism though, I make no pretense of operating on behalf of any company, entity, or ridiculous basis of impartiality. I am my own person. Love it, or click on over to something else.

What I do do is write, on my own cheap dime, about places and people and events a lot quicker than weeklies or magazines, and often about things of local interest ignored by any road kill-obsessed local news (Atlanta) organization, making blogging the perfect forum to become a — great gossip columnist!

Call it what you will, it’s also perfect for someone in video production, as posts can be done on the keyboard, or on video. I started doing that just the other day, and can’t wait to do more. Watch out Ze Frank…

Do I think “that blogging is journalism?” Some of it, yes.

Do I think “that it is fair to journalists who earned four year degrees and know the ethics (whether they practice them or not)to be over-ridden by bloggers who claim to have the “real news”? Or do you think that blogging is a more direct source of information rather than reading it from a journalist who may be censored?”

Firstly, your question is loaded and badly phrased, giving me only two options, both of which I disagree with. I would disagree that graduates are “over-ridden” by bloggers – in fact any graduate with any sense would be blogging themselves. Bloggers are hardly taking over the news industry, but rather providing an alternative or complementary news service to a public increasingly distrusting of time-starved or lazy journalists who simply rewrite press releases. They are also a great way to hear from people ‘on the ground’, whether that’s people living through the Iraq war, troops fighting there, or police, nurses, teachers and scientists who know more about topical issues than journalists and politicians.