Prompt's TechBlog

When Time Magazine picked 'you' as its Person of the Year for 2006, bloggers were quick to deride it as empty bandwagon-jumping.

"This is a nice little idea, that we can "change the world" now that we have the internet to voice our opinions to anyone who may care to listen... [But] how many things have changed, how many governments have changed their policies because of irate bloggers?," commented 'hanna80' on a post on the Guardian's Comment is Free blog site.

These are fair questions. It probably will be some time before policymakers start viewing irate blog posts as a barometer of the nation's will - and even longer before they start acting on it.

But that doesn't mean nothing is changing. The very fact that 'hanna80' was able to comment on an article on the web site of a national newspaper - let alone the fact that the article itself was written by a blogger and not a Guardian journalist - surely shows that Web 2.0 has changed something.

That something is, of course, the nature and landscape of the media, and the changes have only just begun.

Amateur bloggers may never replace professional news reporters, for example, but blogging may well spell the end for the 'lifestyle columnist'. Thousands of talented writers are documenting their daily lives in ways that are funny, fascinating, moving and self-deprecating - and are garnering appreciative audiences because of it.

Yet although they now face competition from hordes of amateurs, lifestyle columnists seem oblivious to their fate. In his end-of-year piece for the Observer Magazine, columnist Euan Ferguson bemoaned "the apparently universally unnoticed loathesomeness of the word 'blog', and the apparently universal belief that what it represents is the future, when what it represents is infantile wibble."

Setting aside the fact that this is an insult to the thousands of Observer readers who keep blogs, a casual read of his article will reveal that Mr Ferguson himself is by no means immune from wibbling. Which makes me wonder what sets him apart from talented bloggers in the age of democratic media. I can't help but conclude that the answer to that is 'nothing'.