I think a new protocol is a good idea. I should add that when I called for building out the Net's directory, I wasn't just thinking about Weblogs. I was thinking about the absence of more complete directory services for the Net itself. Bigger issue.

Scott also says Google needs to add a Weblogs tab (with up to the minute results) to the newly introduced Google News service. I have mixed feelings about that. Blogs are journals, but I'm not sure they're news sources in the conventional sense that Google seems to be assuming with its service. I recently suggested to Google that they add an online publication to their list of 4000+ sources. A human wrote back with a polite but negative response that suggested that the system wouldn't work if it assumed too wide a definition of what a news outlet is. Maybe that definition excludes anything with an inlet as well as an outlet, or that produces continuous unfinished work.

The human/non-human side of the question was visited by Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute and Rex Hammock back in September, when Google News was still new.

I think blogs are too personal, too conversational, too interactive — too human — to be considered "outlets" for anything. The journals we call "blogs" and the journals we call "publications" are very different in kind. Blogs are totally native to the world of ends we call the Web. Publications are native to the physical world. They are adapted to the Web, but not native to it. One way they don't adapt is in the permanent nature of their output. Once published, it's done. Unlike publications, blogs are subject to subsequent editing and re-editing. They also welcome edits by others. The are alive in the sense that they are, like their authors, unfinished.

That said, blogs still belong on the library shelves of the Net's directory, and of the readers guides provided by the likes of Google.