The threshold has been passed. The cow has been branded. The… Ok, stop, stop. It’s enough to say that now that VG, maybe the world’s biggest daily newspaper measured in circulation relative to population (350.000 to 4.5 Million), has dubbed its new page 3 column “VG-bloggen”, it’s official: It is no longer necessary to explain what a blog is every time we Norwegians write about blogs in non-blogosphere contexts. The launch more or less coincided with the business paper Dagens Næringsliv running a blog magazine piece (see jill for facsimile and summary). In retrospect, however, I’m certain it will look very strange that it took so many years for the Norwegian press to catch up.

In only the second post VG commentator Anders Giæver was confronted with the mighty power of bloggers, as they tore his short text about “Deep Throat” to pieces…

*Blog hyperbole generator plug-in suddenly coughs and comes to abrupt standstill*

…well, not exactly. Giæver wrote a hardly very ambitious, light text about how VG quoted a rumour about Mark Felt in 1999, and titled the column “VG revealed Deep Throat – first”. What Giæver then encountered was not some mighty blogger power, just the usual noise cultivated by among others his own VG in its discussion forums (a culture discussed earlier here).

More interestingly, Giæver used the occasion to quote and link to document.no, one of the most widely read Norwegian blogs, that has existed for 2,5 years longer than the VG blog.

Some of us who experienced the dotcom boom and bust more or less from within have been excited, but stayed quite low key about the potential that personal publishing might have. We had heard our fair share of hyperbole and impossible revolutionary claims and wouldn’t feel good about pushing the repeat button. So let’s stay on the course of calm analysis, but remove our self-imposed mental and conceptual limits at the same time. A clue was given by veteran web journalist Paal Leveraas in Dagens Næringsliv’s story:

The audience will increasingly choose the voices they trust in a fragmented media landscape. For an increasing number of people, especially youth, it’s a blog and not the newspapers that is the portal to mainstream news. They go from the blog to the newspaper that the blog links to.

We will have both, the noise and the credibility. And much, much more.