This is my translation of a French article, done because Google's automatic rendition is a bit bewildering..

If you have a modem, Glenn Reynolds has an opinion to offer you. This professor of law at the University of Tennessee is one of the thousands of Americans who, each morning, turn on their computer and update their "weblog" or "blog", a journal on line filled with personal commentary on current events and links to other sites. Security in the airports? Hunger strike of prisoners at Guantanamo? Launching of an Islamic doll to counter the success of Barbie in Iran? On InstaPundit.com, Glenn Reynolds touches on everything. Inaugurated in August, this site, prolific with 20-30 little articles a day, breaks records: with 30 thousand visitors a day, he captures on his own a quarter of the traffic of a cybermagazine like Salon.com. And traditional media celebrate InstaPundit as one of their own, by opening their columns to the successful weblog.

Freshness. "This guy is a superstar!" exclaims James Taranto, editor in chief of Best of the Web Today, the daily weblog of the Wall Street Journal, which regularly relays InstaPundit's scoops and cites it among its sources of information. The WSJ is one of the first American press organs to underline the success of the weblogs. The attention of the media is brought at first to the blogs of journalists and commentators, like those of gay writer Andrew Sullivan and futurist Virginia Postrel. But the terrorist attacks have fed a curiosity for weblogs of private persons: "After September 11, I have followed them attentively, because of the intensity of emotion and the immediacy of the topics of discussion," explains Scott Norvell, editor in chief of the conservative Fox news channel's site. Several bloggers have impressed him by the tone and freshness of their viewpoints: "Too often we in the media keep coming back to the same commentators," he says. "We had a chance there to widen our sphere." Fox.com offered Glenn Reynolds a regular column, and at the end of February the site recruited other blog authors, some neither journalists nor writers, to distill current events into a new column, Fox Weblog.

Conversation. Among the pens courted by Fox: a San Francisco educator, a Washington aerospace devotee, and Moira Breen, a stay-at-home mother in the rural state of Oregon in the northwest of the United States. This 44-year-old "computer geek" says she was surprised to have aroused so much interest with her "humble web log", launched in November, "Inappropriate Response": "I have the impression that many visitors are very, very irritated by traditional media and flee to the webloggers," she says. "Blogs spur people to read, to write more and to reflect."

For writer and blogger Ken Layne, a good blog must give a feeling of "reading an intelligent conversation and, thanks to the links, hoisting yourself to the higher stages of the discussion."

Since September 11, Glenn Reynolds thinks he has proven that "anyone reasonably intelligent can do the same thing as the traditional expert commentators." His opinion is shared by Ken Layne, who attributes to bloggers more humor and common sense: "Remember the anthrax crisis, the American media's reaction was completely exaggerated," the writer emphasizes. He is convinced, on the other hand, that "the bloggers were quite capable of putting the story in perspective."

Thanks to free tools, it's cheap to publish a blog ... and brings in little or nothing. The most popular blogs install a virtual tip-jar on their site. Andrew Sullivan goes so far as to compare the Blogger software, at the root of the weblog phenomenon, to the Napster of journalism: "The blog revolution has just begun to transform the world of media," the writer affirms. For Eugene Volokh, specialist law professor at UCLA, the weblog gives new effect to the first amendment to the American Consitution (which guarantees among others the freedom of expression and of the press): "Critics of the First Amendment have regularly emphasized that if people have the right to express themselves in theory, they cannot always express themselves in fact," he explains. With the arrival of blogs, "the principle of freedom of expression born at the beginning of the last century, in a world of the written, keeps its promises in cyberspace."

Competition. But of course a weblogger's freedom has its limits: "Michael", manager in a Wall Street firm and noted blogger, recounts that he was recently invited to write an opinion piece for the paper version of the Wall Street Journal. He reluctantly had to decline, for fear of shocking his clients by exposing his blog and his personal ideas. For James Taranto, of the Wall Street Journal, blogs have the disadvantage of being too numerous: "There are so many weblogs, thousands of weblogs, that when you find a good one you ignore the others." He thinks that certain blogs, like InstaPundit, have established their audience, will keep it and continue to figure in the reputable media. New bloggers will meet resistance: Scott Norvell, of Fox.com, reports that three-quarters of the reactions to the Fox weblog are positive, but a quarter of the readers are critical, not to say condescending, toward these "non-professionals". Ken Layne remembers the time, not so long ago, when the traditional press exhausted [?] Matt Drudge, former t-shirt dealer turned webstar, with the success of his Drudge Report, a site of links, rumors and scoops ancestral to the weblog: "The press has not mentioned him much since he touched off the Clinton-Lewinsky affair," Ken Layne states. "Yet his audience has never been as important."