blog writing style to trust and social networks

I've been thinking about the different styles of blog writing and their differences from other writing styles, such as journalisim or academia. Partly as a reaction to the James Moore vs Andrew Orlowski discussions, see also Joi Ito on this topic.
I was discussing it with Anno and she mentioned comonplace books or scrapbooks, as her analogy for weblogs. I think that there is quite a bit to that, but am interested in other areas too.
Various people have boldly claimed that weblogs are the new journalism, I don't agree, journalism has several differences, It has an organisational voice, it is edited, it is often news only in its focus. I think that there are some parallels with academia, given the liberal use of citation or linking. Kevin Marks noted that webloggers link to their sources and some have an idea of fair representation, I feel that this is probably due to the amount of rapid peer reviewing to which you can be exposed.
However sometimes it feels a bit like Radio4 or NPR and creating short radio documentaries, pick your new topic of interest write some stuff and link in your sources.
I guess it depends upon the style you write in, some a more lists of links, like old style homepages, others are more considered essay writing only posting occasionally. For me it is somewhere between essay writing and a scrapbook. There is also a strong element of collaborative authoring to weblogs, commenting and trackback features turn it into a distributed community discussion forum.
This leads to a couple of things, I can assess one particular person on the basis of their writing and I can get to know and trust even people who I have never met, it is stronger relationship than I might get via a mailing list. Euan points to Sébastien Paquet discussing trust. This trust helps build social networks and it is these networks that help to form some of the social capital that I've been disucussing in relation to the cultural differences articles I wrote earlier in the month. Ross Mayfield has an interesting analysis of social capital and how it relates to weblogs, showing that weblogs allow different levels of social network at different levels of scale, rising from collaboration to communication to publishing, he says that we are now in the network age, which I'd agree with. Certainly I get a slight irritation when some people don't have a blog, a bit like some people used to not have an email address or mobile / cell phone number. I want to know them better or what to have the same kinds of conversations with them as I can with others.