Harvard University professor Edward Glaeser:

[…] Blogs and columns are quite different, and The Marginal Revolution illustrates what can make blogs exciting. Mr. Cowen and his collaborators post to the website with astonishing regularity. Their blog posts are often brief introductions to some external source of information. The best bloggers use an informal style that make the readers feel as if they are old friends. If you read the Freakonomics blog, you will be let into the private life of one of this age&#8217-s great economists. The chatty conversational style of blogs works well with the discussions that they facilitate among readers who react to an initial blog post and then to each other.

By contrast, an op-ed column is a somewhat formal 750 word art form that usually contains some sort of clear policy punch line. I am thinking of imitating Cato&#8217-s constant repetition of Delenda Est Carthago by ending each column with the mantra &#8220-Manhattan needs more construction and rent control must end.&#8221- Good columns are self-contained, since they should be accessible to readers who have never previously heard of the author. […]

Absurd:

1. A blog post can be structured like a formal Op-Ed column &#8212-among other possibilities.
2. It&#8217-s untrue to say that Marginal Revolution does only news aggregation. As Felix Salmon noted, their coverage of the 2007 Nobel Prize in economics was outstanding. It&#8217-s also untrue to say that Freakonomics only publishes about &#8220-the private life&#8221- of today&#8217-s economists.
3. As newspaper and magazine readers move to the Internet, there will be a convergence between old media and new media.
4. Don&#8217-t be obsessed by defining what a blog is &#8212-it can be so many things (modern writings, or formal writings). Instead, focus your attention on the blogging software, which is more and more the premier kind of web publishing tools &#8212-as opposed to the old-fashioned HTML editors, which produce classic websites. The New York Times uses WordPress to power its blogs, and so do plenty of other mainstream media companies. The reason for that is that the blogging software packages are the most advanced web publishing tools and fit very smoothly within the Web&#8217-s architecture.

I won&#8217-t read the column of mister Edward Glaeser in the New York Sun. He looks like an old schmuck to me.

Previously: Another way to measure the popularity of blogs: their number of feed subscribers