First, you are 100% right — not 99%, but 100% right — that the real impact of blogging and other new citizen-created media is that they give potentially EVERYONE in society a voice now. In essence, we’re talking about a revolt of the voiceless against the heedless — in politics, business, and culture. And if you have the chance to read my book, you’ll see that the single most prominent and consistent theme running through it is, to borrow an old phrase, that “the masses make history” and that what gives blogging its power is that its a grassroots, bottom-up phenomenon still in the making.

(Check out my latest post on how ordinary citizen consumers are using blogs to reshape the ways companies to business at http://www.blogrevolt.com.)

At the same time, I faced the challenge: What’s the best way to show what blogging can do and has done to people’s lives? I could interview Joe Blow from Nowheresville and have him tell his story (which few people would be interested in hearing about). Or I could interview Wil Wheaton, a fairly well-known actor known to the public who used his blogging to reinvent himself as a writer. Since more people are going to want to read about Wil Wheaton than Joe Blow, more people will read my book and I won’t have wasted 100,000 words writing about an issue I think is so important but no one is going to read about.

Also, some of the most powerful ways that blogging changes society are revealed in the stories of people like liberal blogger DailyKos or GI blogger Colby Buzzel, whose blogging work had such an impact it made them famous. If you want to show how ordinary people can use blogging to make a real impact on society, who better to interview than someone like Kos?

(We may be sick to death of stories about him, but the majority of book buyers and citizens in America have never heard of him.)

Finally, if you’re trying to write about whether or not blogging can be a sustainable business, who better to interview than Calacanis and Denton and Battelle — along with others involved in actually trying to build such businesses?

Anyway, I hope to clarifies some of my motivations. I’m happy to answer any other questions if you have any.