the big austin blog panel came and went without much ado. interesting sort of consensus reached: blogs will supplement, augment and be a thorn in the side of mainstream media. this certainly is the case now, and will be more so going forward. this is a good thing.
also discussed audience. a blogger rarely has a broad audience. in fact, blogs by nature tend toward a rather specific audience.
for these reasons, i'm quite curious now as to how blogs and mainstream media will interact in the future. can blogs play to a larger, mainstream audience? will a larger, mainstream audience even exist for traditional publications to write to, or will blogs lead us toward more specificity?
but the one question no one could answer is how accountability and credibility can be judged in the blogosphere. peer-to-peer interactions will solve most of these problems, but if blogs are to somehow replace traditional media, there will need to be some sort of structure that ensures accountability and reliability (e.g. truth). Those standards don't always work with mainstream media now, but those standards at least exist. From whence do the come for blogs, and do we even want that type of structure?