There is in my office a rack of equipment devoted to making music. That's not what makes me a musician. What makes me a musician is that I make music. It may not be great music, but it's music.

Over in a box, I have a few discs containing programming tools. Doesn't make me a programmer. What would make me a programmer would be the application of relevant skills -- skills I either don't have or don't use.

I've licensed a copy of Radio Userland to create a weblog, and have borrowed server space from a friend. That's not what makes me a journalist. What makes me a journalist is the use of the weblog tool and the application of 25 years of professional experience.

As President Jed Bartlet says, it's not as easy as it looks.

There's been a ton of bandwidth wasted on the question of whether weblogging qualifies as journalism. After a few months of doing this, and from the perch of having been part of the online revolution from nearly as long as there's been an online revolution, and from the perspective of a long career in big-time and small-potatoes journalism, here's my answer:

It depends.

There are different kinds of weblogs. There's the "here's what I had for breakfast" weblog. There's the rantlog. There's the "here are five neat stories cadged from CNN" weblog. There's the "five neat stories on a focused topic that I follow closely and here's an opinion about what they mean" weblog. And there's the "here's some purely original content on a subject about which I'm personally expert" weblog.

Journalism is about Advancing The Story. What can we tell you today regarding something you care about that we didn't know yesterday? To the extent that a weblog does that, a weblog is committing journalism. The quality of that journalism is another matter, but that's not the question we're hacking at here.

What about the place of the blogspace in the media pecking order? It would be nice to believe that weblogs matter a great deal. Seven or eight years ago, some of us believe that Usenet would change the world, too. The sad fact is, it didn't. And in the media world, weblogs don't matter either. Not yet, and maybe not ever. Here's why.

In the entire world, there are perhaps 10 newspapers and another 10 broadcast outlets that set the global news agenda. I have my list and you have yours, but I bet they overlap by at least half. Let's be overgenerous and say we can agree on 25 of each. There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of others. The best they can hope for is that something they report can attract the attention of one of the agenda-setters. I can tell you from personal experience how demoralizing it is to be asked to generate story to match something the NYTimes has printed which is itself a rehash of something you wrote weeks earlier.

Look at blogspace. There are maybe 25 or 50 excellent sites that everyone reads, and then there's Everyone Else. And those top sites set precisely what agenda and make what impact on the real world?

When MSNBC launched, I buttonholed Andy Lack, then president of NBC News and now president and COO of the entire network. I asked him, given the name of the network, his corporate partner and his plans for a web site, what sort of plans he had for interactivity. He looked at me like I'd farted, said, "None" and moved on to gladhand someone more important. (At the time I was only the editor of NetGuide, the largest magazine about using the Internet.)

What will give weblogs journalistic legitimacy? When there are webloggers who advance a story better, faster, more completely than Big Media. Adam Curry did a hell of a job with the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, it's true, and there was a ton of great stuff written about 9/11. But it's going to take big scoops on major stories of general public interest to make people take notice.

You know -- like what Matt Drudge used to do.

Is weblogging journalism? The question confuses the technology with the act it supports -- not something that technologists have ever done before, oh no no no. Just as the equipment doesn't make me a musician or a programmer, blogging doesn't mean you're a journalist. But what makes today's blogging tools e exciting is that they're building an infrastructure that allows the rapid and broad dissemination of information. It's an infrastructure that's a natural for building a journalistic enterprise around.

You want to use weblogs to do journalism? Go for it. Pick a story. Advance it every day, every hour. The infrastructure of blogspace will help you get the word out. If you've picked the right story and you're good enough at advancing it, your work will bubble up. And if you're the first blogger to get cited on A1 of the NYTimes, glory be.

Just remember: it's not as easy as it looks.