Bloggers like to deride MSM (the mainstream media, in their lingo) for not "getting it." To avoid some of the sarcasm endemic to the new medium, we declare up front: Technology Review gets it. In fact, we love blogs so much that technologyreview.com is in part a blog site: we publish some of our most popular writers on blogs.

Thirty-two million Americans read blogs in 2004, according to the Pew Research Center. That is because blogs have great powers: they can spread the ideas of individuals faster, farther, and more cheaply than anything seen before. At their best, blogs are subversive, provocative, and fearless. Most fascinatingly, the ideas proposed on blogs have some of the characteristics of commodities in a free market. New postings are quickly valued by the blogosphere's economy: reliably stupid bloggers are not linked to by their peers, and no one visits their websites.