Could there be any better proof that blogging has gone mainstream now that Frank Bruni, the restaurant reviewer for the New York Times, has debuted his own blog Diner’s Journal -- accessible through the Times’ website at www.nytimes.com

The spectre of Bruni the Blogger is a trend marker that must cause some identity anxiety for the 70,000 new bloggers who daily join the medium world wide, not to mention the many food bloggers who, up until now, may have fancied a cutting edge image of themselves as maverick industry watchdogs or alternative media anarchists merely by virtue of their format. One thing is for sure, the arrival of Mr Bruni’s blog immediately separated out the politicians and marketing geniuses from the rest of the blogherd when certain individuals jumped on the opportunity to flog their own websites to the New York Times readership under the guise of a congratulatory note planted in the reader feedback and comment sections.

Who knows what prompted Mr. Bruni to add to the digital chatter. Perhaps he was required to do so by an employer anxious to keep up with the fashions of the moment. Perhaps he was tired of being the target of the various Bruni-bash blogs that publicly comment on the validity of his every word, and wanted to make his own constant cyber presence felt. Maybe he just doesn’t have enough deadlines to keep pace with.

Heaven knows, although they may cost nothing in a monetary sense to produce, and technically anyone can do them, it’s not easy to produce a blog that is going to amaze the world – or at least, not every day. Just as it is with cooking, what can take days to shop for and prepare can be devoured in mere seconds and there you are … quickly back again at square one. Unless you have nothing else in your life (like a full time job) that competes, and can afford to spend time sitting in front of a screen in your bathrobe, coddling a cup of coffee while tweaking your prose and polishing your own opinions, online content can easily become frivolous or worse, merely utilitarian.

Nevertheless, the sheer number of blogs and their growing popularity, have meant that the mainstream press can no longer afford to ignore them, or just lurk around them, and reaction seems to be falling into two camps.

Some, like Mr. Bruni, appear ready to embrace the genre, while others tend to think it should require standards. In the last issue of Food and Wine, columnist Pete Wells printed an essay In the Belly of the Blog in which he categorized what, in his opinion, differentiated a good blog from a bad one -- the “cheese-sandwich� types from the ones that have you leaving nose smudges on your monitor screen. An effort for which he was thoroughly flamed this past Monday by a touchy Andrea Strong of  www.strongbuzz.com who felt she had been classified as so much Velveeta.

Both writers, in my humble opinion, made valid and irrelevant contributions to the discussion. While I agree with Ms. Strong that abandoning a high-powered career in corporate law to devote oneself to the lowly paid (unless you are Mr. Bruni) profession of food writing certainly proves one's passion and commitment, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the sacrifice makes one particularly good at it.

Unfortunately, Ms Strong does possess a somewhat pedestrian style of writing. What passes for her as wit is often merely prattle, and her restaurant reviews, as Mr. Wells points out, do exhibit a lot of “heavy breathing�. It’s never difficult to pick out which restaurateurs she is friendly with. Perhaps she also has a full time job which siphons off any literary brilliance. (Unless she runs with Paris Hilton she couldn’t live in Manhattan and afford her rent otherwise – let alone her seat at all those restaurants.) But on the other hand, she knows her subject thoroughly, she does her research, she pulls no punches, and in a city where there is a rigid hierarchy of who receives what news first, and in what order, she regularly scoops NYC’s establishment food press. No small feat that, and no doubt what accounts for her claim that her site is monitored by the editors of Food and Wine themselves, plus other members of the mainstream press.

Interestingly enough, after three years of ignoring The Strong Buzz, and after much irreverence towards the New York Times on Ms Strong’s part, Florence Fabricant, a regular New York Times food section contributor, casually linked her column to the site yesterday. Perhaps she doesn’t care for Mr Wells either and wanted to make sure Strong’s outburst received maximum attention. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence.

Where I believe Mr. Wells missed the mark was is in his instance that there is a wrong or a right way to present a blog and that there should be some sort of accepted standard (his) for what comprises a superior one. Well, even if there was one, who would that serve? Unlike the more traditional venues, the beauty of blogs, and some would say their horror, is in their very nature as a form of personal dialogue. Like the guy muttering at the back of the bus, you may be a blogger holding court with an audience of one, or you may be attracting the eyeballs of the crowd. But unless you are selling banner ads, who needs the justification of numbers – or rules for that matter? Setting aside your blogger’s responsibility in matters of accuracy, legality, or social consideration, if only five people validate your blog with their mouse clicks and that is enough to justify the investment of time and resources to you, then who else has cause to play arbitrator.

The natural laws of supply and demand are thwarted and artificially regulated in so many other areas (take our provincial liquor laws, for example), can we not afford to let the blogosphere go free range even if all it does is wander about and lay eggs?