Dana summarised Scoble's thoughts on The difference between newsgroups and blogs, given during a talk at the American Marketing Association's seminar. Obviously my heckles rise whenever I read the word marketing, but Robert appears to be looking through rose tinted spectacles on this one.

The writer decides what you read, in that IF you want to stay up on the happenings of the group, you have little choice but to wade through their stuff.

Robert seems to say that the reader decides what to read in blogs because they can subscribe and unsubscribe? The power of choice is good, but there's no difference between usenet and blogs here, you have the same power to subscribe and unsubscribe. Of course when reading a group you see all the posts, it's not just the writing of one person, but when you subscribe to a meta feed, like the blogs.msdn.com you have the exact same problem. Yes blogs make it easier to subscribe to an individual, but it's not beyond the wit of man, or kill files to do the same in usenet.

You can't really 'brand' newsgroup participation or discussion.

Robert thinks branding is good and you can't brand usenet. Microsoft have done a good job of branding usenet in their communities.microsoft.com site. Certainly usenet clients don't support branding (unless you're reading HTML news), but that's a problem with the client, not the facility itself. You might as well complain that by reading Robert's RSS feed in NewsGator, within Outlook, his blog is not branded (beyond his writing style). Is a particular writing style not a brand? Perhaps not to a marketing conference, but to me it certainly feels like one.

Newbies can ruin it; you can't get rid of them.

The value of the group deteriorates as lesser and lesser personalities enter the group and dilute the discussion. All newsgroups start out valuable because they are started by passionate thought leaders, but eventually deteriorate.

There's the perennial newbie problem. Usenet is snobby, newbies are looked down upon and Robert seems to go along with this. This was not something I expected as he sings the praises of new, "undiscovered" blogs all the time. Why can't usenet posters be treated with the same respect? Is this a bias because of the medium?

Part of the value of blogs (and usenet) is the replies to posts. If I had posted as a comment in Dana's site how could you, the reader, ignore it? You have to tune it out. You can do this on usenet, or better, use the kill file facility in your reader.

Signal vs. Noise - Noise overruns eventually, and you can't turn it off or tune it out if you want the content

Blogs are already creating noise, a simple google search proves this. Blog comments noise is building in decibel levels, through comment spam, trolling and organised group dissent.

Are blogs a good thing? Sure. Is usenet dead? People have been saying that for years and it still hasn't happened. Heck, maybe blogs will take the newbies away from usenet to an easier medium and we'll see usenet return to the frankly disappointing medium Robert expects it to be.