After an interesting discussion with fabien and dks about weblogs, I've read an article concering this trend. Weblogs serve several functions : - selection of material: by reading some specialist's posts you can select relevant information. - personal knowledge management : the blog is an "outboard brain" according to Cory Doctorrow, this stance is consistant with the distributed cognition framework : the tool (e.g. the weblog) should be considered as a part of a cognitive system. - an opportunity for social networking (between editors and readers, and readers could also be editors of their own blog).

I should read more about content syndication and social networking tools :)

Anyway, the observation of particular clique (i.e. a kind of bloggers' mob) is incredibly instructive in the sense that it's today's form of on-line communities, fifteen years after the BBS or minitel stuff. Of course bingirl's blog is an interesting starting point for french readers...