A few weeks ago, the proceedings of Into the Blogosphere started making the rounds. I refrained from commenting since I hadn't actually read any of the papers. I've managed to work through a couple and here's the skinny from an unabashed techno, engineering geek.
You have to be heavy into communication theory for the papers to be relevant and even so I'm not sure how "useful" they are. Mostly they seem to capture tightly focused snapshots of how people use blogs, or how people are thinking about blogs. But not of them struck me as seminal. Not saying they're bad, just that I think the ultimate impact of this collection will be quite muted.
I don't know what to make of this, but there are only about 40 comments, for 20 papers. There were 62 del.icio.us bookmarks as of this writing and three grand citations according to Waypath (Not sure I believe that). Any of you folks out there actually read the papers?
Truth be told I found the University of Minnesota's integration of Movable Type into the academic computing infrastructure the big discovery on my end.