A Blog publishing goldrush has broken out in the UK, about a year after it hit the US in the form of Gawker and Weblogs Inc and others. Since it is so easy to create a blog, one can’t help wondering if hundreds of blogs will start clamouring for a limited number of obvious niches (yet more gadget blogs anyone?) thus creating a mirror image in the blogging world of the competition that already exists in so-called proper online publishing. It may, in fact, end up being the case that the sites with the original content and reviews, say about gadgets, will benefit from all this. Or perhaps many blogs, because of their fast publishing cycle will supplant more traditional models. It’s hard to say. One thing’s for sure, no-one has quite worked out what will happen when a blog, which does not have the rigours of fact checking and peer review contained in a normal journalistic enterprise, falls foul of the UK’s unforgiving libel laws. We shall see.