If you had any doubts regarding the difference between new and old media, merely compare and contrast: In egalitarian Las Vegas: the Blog World Expo convention, in which bloggers with traffic ranging from zero to millions of bytes served could--and did--attend, mingle, ask questions, and learn from each other. Or as Steve Green puts it, "The job here was to meet people, make connections, and make for better blogging."

Concurrently, in elitist Manhattan: "Stark, in-your-face snobbish social inegalitarianism", as Mickey Kaus puts it--which, if anything, sounds like an understatement, in which journalists and their audience maintained a forced distance from each other that was chasm-like in its symbolism.