More and more newspapers are starting to "get" blogging. The Washington Post is probably among the leaders in the mainstream media to really embrace this new form of media. Check out any of their articles online and there is a box with a link to Technorati and and how many blogs are linking to that particular article. It's a great way to find out what's being blogged about online.

The San Diego Union-Tribune -- which signs my paycheck -- still doesn't get it. Yes, the Union-Tribune has blogs -- but they're only sporadically updated and the paper's Web site doesn't really promote them that much. The paper's Insight editor, Bob Caldwell, had a blog for a couple of brief months, but he didn't really know what he was doing with it (like a little kid looking at an Xbox360, he just thought it would be a good thing to have) and it died a reasonably quick death. I'd point out that they already have someone on staff that really does know how to blog and who could really bring in a lot more readers, but you knew that already.

Now, none of these blogs the Union-Tribune hosts have hit counters on them, so I don't really know how popular they are ... actually, I should say I didn't know how popular they were until I picked up this month's Inside Edition. Inside Edition is the paper's internal, four-page newspaper. It tells you what's going on in each department and had pictures of the new hires, retirees, etc. This month's edition touts one of the paper's blogs -- I'm not going to single out the individual -- and contains this sentence:

The blog drew more than 3,400 page views and stirred a number of readers to contribute their own thoughts.

Yep, that number is accurate: 3,400. For October, the Union-Tribune Web site, SignonSanDiego.com got 2.63 million hits. A sneeze should pick up 3,400 hits on a Web site getting that sort of traffic.

An Instalanche -- a link from Instapundit.com -- can easily get someone two or three times as many hits on a bad day.

Color me befuddled.