This is certainly true of my linking patterns - a good share of the blogs I link to were found from links on other blogs, not from random browsing.

Another interesting thing is that Live Journal - whose residents are often looked down upon by the snobs of the blog world - has one of the best ideas: Making it easy for its users to set up a list of friends, creating little mini-communities. Non-blog sites like Ryze also focus on community, by having friends lists and subnetworks you can join.

That's really most of the reason why I blog - as a former journalist part of me craves more readers, for sure, but the community of regular readers, those people I read all the time too, are much more important to me.

For people like myself who have long ago moved away from either their small-town homes or the old neighborhoods in cities, the Internet does provide the wonderful feature of being able to live in, or even create, your own small town.

In the newspaper world long ago, most large cities and even a lot of smaller ones had multiple papers, sometimes representing varying political views. Now most places have just one paper that generally ries to head somewhere down the middle of popular opinion, usually annoying people on both sides of the spectrum.

The saving grace of the Internet is that even if clicks get concentrated on larger sites, this should not drive the small guys out of business, since the cost of entry is so much smaller.

It will be interesting to see how all this plays out ... and by the above principle, if you are reading this you are in a small (but one hopes happy) minority.