Has Blogging Run out of Steam?

Trevor Butterworth posts this article about how blogging is dying and how it's never going to overthrow mainstream media.

In my opinion he completely misses the point. He is a mainstream media writer. He seems to think that people are attempting to blog for a living and that if there's no business model, there's no point. The point is this: it's a conversation. That's it. If you don't think conversation is important in it's own right then I recommend "The Cluetrain Manifesto". In fact I recommend it anyway.

The conversation may head to commercial gains but it often does not and is not expected to. Blogging, if it intended to have any commercial value at all, typically generates money from the halo effect, similar to open source software. Yes, some blogs are not that interesting, but many are. And now with podcasts and video blogs, it seems clear to me that although CNN is probably at no risk, neither are the 4 million or so or so blogs out there.

The really interesting thing is that he put a link at the bottom of his post that links to a blog that he setup specifically to capture comments for this article. ;-)