In the end, participants seemed to agree that there is plenty of room for just about any kind of writing on the Web. I love the fact that a lot of people are passionate about, and committed to, personal expression on the Web. What I don't love is that some people seem to have an unbridled hostility toward forms of personal expression different from their own. Some people seem to feel that if you don't produce a certain number of words or you don't delve into certain aspects of your personal life, then you shouldn't have a Web site at all. But I think there's room on the Web for all forms of personal expression.
Blogs are decidedly noncommercial.
Banner ads are rare. In many cases, blogs seem to exist for each other, creating communities to help filter quickly through new, hot information and trends discovered on daily Web sojourns. You cultivate people who are reliable and trustworthy. Weblogs are a very valuable filtering tool for so many of us. Bloggers add their own foraging notes to links discovered on other weblogs.