An in his first post, an eloquently worded insight:

But as I've talked with others about the social dynamics of blogs - from Cory and Meg at PC Forum in March to tonight's dinner with Ito-san - I've started to see it's less about one-way broadcasting of opinions with heavy meme duplication than I thought it was. In fact I can see places where I'm doing things in the context of a mailing list that are just far better suited to a public blog - such as forwarding a story or URL where you have to ask yourself if the 500 people who happened to be on that list really wanted to hear about it, whether it's more appropriate for some other list, and whether cross-posting will annoy anyone.

More importantly, I realized while talking with Joi tonight that Clay's "power law" thesis may be true, but that the arrangement of the X-axis under the curve (the popularity ranking of individuals and memes) is much more dynamic than in most other online forum tools. This is really cool and really distinguishes blogs from mailing lists and web forums, which tend to reinforce established members and ideas rather than make it easy to introduce new ones.