Blogs and their power were the subject of a panel discussion at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University on Thursday, with panelists making some interesting observations.“We’re seeing about a million [blog] posts every single day,” said Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, which tracks blogs. “It’s really taking off and it’s not just a U.S. phenomenon,” Sifry said. Blogs are being published in languages such as Korean, Chinese and Portuguese, he said. Panelists discussed potential business models for blogs. “Most are going to be some kind of media model. There will have to be some kind of ad support,” according to Allen Morgan, managing director at venture capitalist Mayfield. Younger audiences have been more familiar with blogs than older persons, said Ned Desmond, executive editor at Time Interactive. With some older audiences, “We find that they barely know what a blog is,” Desmond said. Panelists noted how blogs have the potential to change the definition of who is a journalist. Coverage of the first of the London bombings this month presented a synergy of blogging and traditional journalism, with persons on the scene who were not journalists able to get photos via cellphone. (From my vantage point, I wonder if perhaps blogs and cellphones could present a new generation of potential Abraham Zapruders. Zapruder was the amateur filmmaker who filmed the visit of President John F. Kennedy to Dallas on November 22, 1963 and ended up with vivid footage of the assassination.)Panelists pondered the potential that something posted on someone’s blog could come back to haunt them decades later. But Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media and a former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, pointed out that people have become more forgiving. Gillmor recalled that Douglas Ginsburg once lost a chance to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice after reports leaked out about past marijuana use. But the current president and his predecessor have had similar issues in their past but were elected anyway, Gillmor noted. “I think we’re going to learn to cut each other some slack. If we don’t, we’re screwed,” Gillmor said. Software Development