At the top of Daypop today is an article from yesterday's USA Today on blogs. This is one of the best, unbiased looks at blogs I've seen in major media. Neither dismissive, nor ignorant and thoughtful about both the strengths and weaknesses of blogs as a medium of amateur journalism. Good sound-bites abound:

Veterans of the political scene admit they're having some trouble adjusting. "When I first got up here, I thought blogging was an Irish dance," says Tricia Enright, a longtime Capitol Hill press secretary who earlier this year became communications director for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. She quickly became a blog believer. Dean, whom bloggers like to cite as Exhibit A of the impact of the medium, runs a blog, hosts other blogs, raises money on blogs and gets ideas from blogs.

As Jay Rosen, a blogger and the chairman of New York University's journalism department, puts it, "Readers are becoming writers."

Their audience tends to be an elite crowd of political junkies who have almost non-stop access to a computer and large amounts of time to surf the Internet for breaking news. In short: political consultants and journalists.

That's what makes political bloggers so powerful, says Jeff Jarvis, an executive with Advance.net, the online branch of Newhouse newspapers and the blogger behind Buzzmachine.com. "It's influencing influencers."

"To read this stuff is to drink politics from a fire hose. There's so much of it that it's hard to process," says Terry Holt, spokesman for President Bush's campaign. But he adds, "There isn't any doubt that it has given voters a real way to participate."

"People are no longer simply consumers of political news. They're publishers of their own," says Bill Mitchell of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

But the biggest raves come from bloggers who have found a voice they never had before. Tom Bevan, a former advertising executive, turned to full-time blogging after a Web site he helped found, RealClearPolitics.com, took off. Bevan, 34, has no experience in politics or journalism. But he says he knows from the feedback that "a lot of influential opinion-makers" are benefiting from his views.

"That's one of the fantastic things about the blogosphere and the Internet," Bevan says. "If you have something to say that's interesting, you will eventually be heard."