Near the close of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom, he discusses blogs:

In the world of journalism, the personal Web site (“blog”) was hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become something quite different. Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs — and the best are very clever — have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public. Although the creators of blogs think of themselves as radical democrats, they are in fact a new Tocquevillean elite. Much of the Web has moved in this direction because the wilder, bigger, and more chaotic it becomes, the more people will need help navigating it.

Zakaria’s only half right, I think. The best blogs are an elitist project of defining and refining what deserves our attention, but the shear number of blogs also makes it a democratic process.

BTW: Think this is the first mention of blogs in a general-interest non-fiction book?