Congrats, not so much to the women writing excellent posts and providing great resources online, but to the Daily News for having the smarts to cover the story.
Now, if only some of these bloggers would actually put some effort into customizing their sites, that would be cool. “Template,” regardless of what I said earlier about blogs, begins with the word “temp.”

It comes via Michael Barrish via Zeldman so you know it has to be good: Lars Holst’s excellent compendium of nicely designed blogs. There are many beautiful blogs out there and Lars has done us all a huge service in providing a comprehensive gallery of blogs that are setting new design standards for the Web.
But I would argue that it’s still text content that is driving the real beauty of blogs and not design — at least not quite yet. I know that this, coming from a design guy, a person that crunches images for a decent living, seems somehow wrong, funny, defeatist. But if you look at some of the most interesting, relevant weblogs out there, they’re not all that well-designed.
Here are a few (and please, no offense to those who own and publish them):

• Anil Dash’s ugly but often prescient blog
• Seth Godin’s timely and useful commentary
• Doc Searls crappily designed but superbly researched notations
• Paul Ford’s fugly but influential Ftrain
• Heath Row’s template-driven, well-written weblog
• Glish’s relevant but sad looking commentary

Would good design make any of these more valuable Web properties? Yes, I believe it would. Interface and interfacing makes a difference, particularly in the way one initially approaches a website. On the Web, first impressions are not everything but they do come close.
But a blog is about second impressions, and then third, fourth, and fifth. In fact, it’s the impressionistic quality of blogs that makes them alternately satisfying, off-putting, and provocative. And those impressions are indeed driven, with occasional exception, by text content alone.

I’m always looking for good news as there seems to be so little of it these days. I found this hard-to-believe report today, demonstrating that 44% of Americans who are online contribute their thoughts to the Web. (The report can also be downloaded from this link at the wonderful Pew Internet and American Life Project site.)
This is a truly astounding statistic and its meaning is both deep and broad. Here are some other stats:
17% have posted written material on sites.
10% have posted comments to newsgroups.
21% have posted photos to websites.
13% have their own website.
2% have blogs.
49% of content creators are women.
48% are between the ages of 30 and 49.
20% of content creators are, yes, students.
If we do the math, this means that, of the approximately 120 million people online in the U.S., 2.4 million have weblogs. This is a sign that the Internet’s vitality is maintained not by corporate interests alone but my individual human beings. It’s a sign that the health of American democracy and speech may not be as dire as one might think. It’s a sign that communication technologies are just now becoming ubiquitous. It’s also a sign that there is a lot of online dating going on.