[cian]

Originally Posted by random50

It was the quality on average I was referring to. I'm much less convinced about the quality side of the argument anyway, aside from in relatively trivial ways such as typos.

But far more people produce blogs, than write newspaper/magazine articles, so the average is not terribly relevant, or important. In some areas its not terribly surprising. In some areas its not that surprising. The quality of some literary blogs is very high indeed, but then literary criticism has always been semi-amateur anyway. And in areas like computing knowledge is not almost entirely disseminated within the community via practitioners. In other areas you have academics such as Juan Cole, or the linguistics blog (forget the name).

Anymore my point was rather that this is terribly surprising, and if ten years ago you had suggested that article lengths pieces would be more and more written by amateurs, with the elite writers doing so at a level far beyond professionals, people would have laughed at you. It seems improbable to me that something similar would happen with novels (short stories and poetry less so, as nobody much makes money out of those anyway), but...

If you remove the ability to profit from a labour intensive activity, you're surely certain to see less output, simply because the creators will have to spend their time on other things to earn a living.

This is true of plenty of creators today, though. Its not ideal (but then what is), but people seem to make do. I'm often surprised to find out how little some relatively famous literary authors make from their work, for example. I think you would see less of certain types of more commercial and genre fiction, but you could possibly see more of other types of fiction merely because there were more routes to an appreciative readership. But its hard for me to imagine any system where a writer like Neil Gaiman did badly financially, even if he never sold another copy of his novels.

This is not so relevant to blogs, by the way, because whilst they may be time consuming to keep running, the initial creation of the blog and the creation of each article is a short project. This also makes them much easier to create from a psychological point of view than books, film, art, etc.

Well yes, but some of the more high profile blogs produce a level of output equivalent to what many freelance journalists produce. So who can say?