Great piece in the Atlantic Monthly by Andrew Sullivan called Why I Blog. Here’s an excerpt.
 

From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple
experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers
was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation
of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the
alternative meant. I’d edited a weekly print magazine, The New Republic,
for five years, and written countless columns and essays for a variety
of traditional outlets. And in all this, I’d often chafed, as most
writers do, at the endless delays, revisions, office politics,
editorial fights, and last-minute cuts for space that dead-tree
publishing entails. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in
the early days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a
narcotic.

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every
writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish
himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional
writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a
publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion
of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer
once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to
proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried
in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all
these troubles evaporated.

Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was
immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my
posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail
seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any
editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally
unstable than any colleague.

Again, it’s hard to overrate how different this is. Writers can be
sensitive, vain souls, requiring gentle nurturing from editors, and
oddly susceptible to the blows delivered by reviewers. They survive,
for the most part, but the thinness of their skins is legendary.
Moreover, before the blogosphere, reporters and columnists were largely
shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes, letters to the editor
would arrive in due course and subscriptions would be canceled. But
reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary,
answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For a long time,
columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled
murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces
before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback
was instant, personal, and brutal.