Lee Gomes of the WSJ thinks that a subset of the technical blogosphere is shaking up tech reporting:

The reality is that while there are now as many tech blogs as stars in the sky, only a tiny fraction of them matter. And those that do aren't part of some proletarian information revolution, but instead have become the tech world's new elite. Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers. And living at the front of the velvet rope line means the big bloggers are frequently pitched and wooed. In fact, with the influence peddling universe in this state of flux, it's not uncommon for mainstream reporters, including the occasional technology columnist, to lobby bloggers to include links to their print articles.

There's a reason for this - when you look across the group of people blogging on technology, most of them are "hands on" people - i.e., they are not just talking about tech, they are producing it. Most (but not all) of the technical journalists suffer from the same problem as a lot of technical management: they hung up their tech spurs years ago, and now rely on other people (or their gut) in order to make decisions.

In business, smaller, nimbler companies "disintermediate" the plodding giants that have forgotten how to be nimble (think MS, circa 1985, or Google 4 years ago). In technology reporting, bloggers are getting the jump on many reporters, because they are still working in the field. Not all technical people can write, but there are plenty who can - and they can report on something far more quickly than the journals can.

One thing I've noticed on this - the technical journals - InfoWorld and ComputerWorld come to mind - have embraced blogging in a way that the MSM really hasn't. This has allowed the smarter publications to stay in the game. I no longer have to wait a week to see what Jon Udell thinks, for instance - he shows up in my aggregator instead. Over on the non-tech side of things, look at the New York Times as the epitomy of not getting this change in the landscape: they've put all the opinion columnists behind a pay wall. It's been a pretty good way of removing those folks (and the Times in general) from the conversation.

Hat tip to Daver Winer.