Blogs Get Thumbs Up From Business. Federal Government Not So Sure.

Technology powerhouses, Yahoo, Google and AOL, are helping to legitimize blogs. Makes sense. Smart businesses go where customers take them.

Yahoo News: Internet “blogs” get a boost from the big search engines, which make the personal journals more accessible and move them toward mainstream journalism.
Yahoo this month said it would include blogs on all its news searches, saying it would give readers more access to “grassroots journalism.”
While blogs have long been frowned upon by traditional media as amateurish, analysts say the public is increasingly looking to blogs for a fresh view on news.
Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said blogs are useful even if they may not be on par with traditional journalism.
“Blogs are discussion forms, and I don’t see any reason why they can’t be indexed” so Internet users can search them, Cornfield said.
“Discussion is an important part of the democratic process.”

Meanwhile, short-sighted U.S. government officials attempt to keep bloggers in their place, that is, far from the inner workings of important things like government.

c|net: Politicians indicated on Wednesday that a proposed law offering journalists special privileges might not be extended to Web loggers.
“The relative anonymity afforded to bloggers, coupled with a lack of accountability, as they are not your typical brick-and-mortar reporters who answer to an editor or publisher, also has the risk of creating a certain irresponsibility when it comes to accurately reporting information,” Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said in a statement prepared for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on reporters’ privilege legislation.