The rise of the literary blog/ Guardian

Even now it is with reluctance that I would refer to myself as a blogger. The stereotype of an over-opinionated and under-qualified dilettante remains too powerful, even for someone like myself who is less likely to subscribe to it and indeed knows better. However, there is now no denying it as, other than the words you're reading, I've just been outed by a new book on the very subject. Which in itself might seem somewhat ludicrous - a book on litblogs?
I was previously acquainted with Marion Boyars as the Transatlantic publisher of Georges Bataille and Hubert Selby, Jr, as well as a rather haphazard account of "DIY culture" they put out a few years back. But their new Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs goes some considerable way towards explaining the rise of this particular field of blogging (books on blogging in general having now reached market saturation point).
Authors Rebecca Gillieron and Catheryn Kilgarriff (who also doubled up as publisher and publicist at Marion Boyars) have assembled a title which is:
"meant to capture this moment ... a book blog keepsake, when book blogs are exploding across the web ... in it we talk about the ones who are good, who should be sought out, communicated with and encouraged."
The book probes the motivation of book bloggers and ponders whether the medium naturally lends itself to the discussion of literature, particularly when compared to the political debate with which the blogosphere has become associated. Given the relatively recent advent of the book blog, it might be deemed somewhat premature to attempt to assess its general impact, and the authors' claims will no doubt be regarded as over-egged by those who remain sceptical of blogging's merits. However, the book serves as a useful and considered defence of book blogging, which has started to influence the marketing plans of most serious publishers today (Penguin has begun to court bloggers quite assiduously of late, for instance, while Snowbooks and Friday Books each have their own blogs).
Book blogging has long been singled out as a vituperative, amateurish activity - for example, Rachel Cooke demanded in The Observer to be spared from "these latter-day Pooters". In doing so, Cooke compared the "measured, rather than spewed out" criticism of Nick Hornby ("a good critic, and an experienced one") to the amateurs she had found online, concluding that paid criticism trumped blogging because critics "can write".
Many readers and writers disagree, however, and one of the most appealing aspects of Gillieron and Kilgariff's book is the amount of space devoted to the rise of British litblogs, as opposed to the more widely publicised book bloggers of the Unites States. Relatively obscure Brutalist blogs get their own sub-chapters, as do the likes of the somewhat grander n+1 (which once attacked blogs thus: "Imagine a grandfather clock that strikes at random intervals. You can't tell time by it and yet you begin to live in constant anticipation of the next random chime"). However, it was Steve Almond's 2005 piece for salon.com, "The blogger who loathed me", that really marked the arrival of litblogs. Denouncing blogging as "a kind of Ponzi scheme in which the object is attention, and the shared illusion is one of relevance", Almond laid in to a number of prominent US litbloggers, countering their emergence with the claim that "Reading them often becomes a legitimized form of scandal mongering. (It's a lot easier to read about Philip Roth's angry ex-wife than it is to read one of his books.)" While I am inclined to sympathise with his argument, however, I couldn't help but smile to note that in 2007, Steve Almond himself joined the blogosphere. Perhaps the lure of the literary blog is simply too hard to resist?