Revolutionary Blogs?

Blogs are revolutionary only in the sense that they're outgrowths of Revolutionary War personal publishing. Rick Klau prompted this thought with a clever post substituting "weblogs" for "pamphlets" in a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's essay about the short polemics that played a great role in moving the American colonies toward independence from Britain. Klau writes: "It becomes obvious that what we're now calling warblogs (at least, those that are not just reporting the war but are advocating a particular point of view) are a continuation of a very American tradition from 250 years ago."
In the literature review on weblogs I'm writing (preparatory for a master's thesis on the same), I cite two other reasons blogs are evolutionary, not revolutionary. An excerpt:

Conceptually blogs aren't entirely new creations. Any "what's new" list in any medium (but especially printed newspapers) qualifies as a blog forerunner. This author thinks specifically of The Wall Street Journal's famous front-page "What's News" columns, which feature synopses of all the day's stories. Stretching the metaphor, one could even say the information contained in the synopses on where to find the full story is a "link" to that content. . . . Cameron Barrett compares them to fanzines, those sometimes-photocopied, sometimes printed newsletters that published everything one could want to know about narrow subjects. Says Barrett: "Like fanzine editors before them, weblog editors embrace a topic or theme and run with it."

Klau, by the way, later notes that other thinkers came up with the pamplet analogy earlier than he. Bloggers' attempts to accurately map the development of ideas add great value to the medium.