Alan Knowles has a new post of his weblog today that brings up a more and more prevolent topic in todays weblogs - hype by blog.

Alot of people started using blogs as a slightly better media for technical information, but it's becomming evident that with subjects ruby on rails, and some of MS astroturfing with marketing material, that blog aggregators like Artima have been abused heavily with rather second rate blogging, about 3rd rate tools.

He goes on a bit more to talk about some of the technology that seems to keep repeating itself (blog readers/aggregators), but I think that the more important item to mention here is the discussion of advertising in blogs. I know that I try to stay away from it somewhat here. I do promote things like the php|tropics conference (and other conferences as they come up), and I try to be fair when it comes to software announcements - but it's hard with all of the promotional stuff that's thrown my way, to keep things news-oritented and stable enough here to where people will not see us as "a sellout" to anyone. There are just too many blogs out there that are moving more and more towards the ad-sponsored realm...