How to legitimise a Blog

So I'm attempting to work on a chapter of my thesis in which I'm examining the problems of legitimizing a blog and the ways in which bloggers, websites and published media are attempting to do so.

I imagine that those who do not have access to the Internet, or are not frequent users / believers in the Internet are those who are most skeptical on the legitimacy and value of blogs. I think most of us who use the Internet accept ideas such as the possibility for lies and false identities and manage to move past this and treat most blogs like reliably fictive stories that most likely have some basis in reality. Yet, in most cases, the way that blogs are being legitimized is through the Internet.

Blogs are chosen by websites that then list them as the "best of the blogs." I imagine this is their way of saying - for those of you who think all blogs are nonsense, here are some that we found that have value. But in the end, the people reading these sites are probably the same people who would read blogs anyways. There are some exceptions thought that I've found interesting - like the site lonelyplanet having a downloadable pdf guide called "travels in the blogosphere." Here they chose - like many other sites - which are the best travel blogs and then post them as a travel guide. I contacted them and asked questions about the guide and just need to go through the answers. The fact that a leading publisher of travel guides directing readers towards online guides seems to be significant.

There are some cases of blogs being published and of bloggers getting funding to do podcasts etc. In general most businesses are looking to exploit the popularity of a blog by sending bloggers their products in hope that they will write about them, or by buying ad space. Articles on blogs are very common in magazines in the computer section of your local magazine rack. Lemonde has several articles, we all know of the "person of the year" article by Time magazine, and I'm sure many others in your average newspaper. These articles however don't seem to be making much of an effort to legitimize blogs but to use them as 'human' interest stories. Most of the attempts to legitimize blogs still remains within the net and for net users.