What about things like e-mail and usenet? OK, usenet is half dead, but ... while it lasted.

BTW, article in "In These Times" about political blogging sounded a familiar tune(excerpt):

As one of the top women bloggers, Chris Nolan, noted on the PressThink blog, “The barrier to entry in this new business isn’t getting published; anyone can do that. The barrier to entry is finding an audience.”

Elite bloggers can play a key role in generating that audience. As Marcotte points out, “A lot more women are moving up in the Technorati rankings” (Technorati is a search engine for the blogosphere) because A-listers like Duncan Black and Kevin Drum in 2005 made it a priority to promote female bloggers. But when someone like Moulitsas decides to stop linking to other blogs—as he has recently done because he doesn’t want to play “gatekeeper”—or when top bloggers repeatedly cite their fellow A-listers, it has enormous consequences. “It’s pretty darn hard today to break in to the A-list if the other A-listers aren’t linking to you,” says Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article_two/2485/

Ooh, and get a load of the last paragraph:

The Washington Monthly profile of Moulitsas included a revealing quote, in which he expressed disappointment at not being able to fulfill his dream of making it big in the tech industry back in 1998: “Maybe at some time, Silicon Valley really was this democratic ideal where the guy with the best idea made a billion dollars, but by the time I got there at least, it was just like anything else—a bunch of rich kids who knew each other running around and it all depended on who you knew.”

The danger is that many may come to feel the same way about the blogosphere in the coming years.

David - email lists have the problem of "finding an audience". Usenet has the problem that there's no audience (now) - it's very little-used comparatively.

Lis - great article, thanks for pointing it out. And how true :-(.