One Story Line About News Blogs: They Lag Far Behind Mainstream; Still A Small Readership; About 32 million people in U.S. occasionally visit blog sites, says Pew study.(INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY)

Byline: BRIAN DEAGON

It took Powerlineblog.com little more than two years to get its first 15 minutes of fame, but then the spotlight shone brightly.

Powerlineblog is one of the 6 million blogs, personal Web sites that post views on news and most any topic.

On the morning of Sept. 9, a Powerline item implied that documents shown by Dan Rather on the "60 Minutes" TV show the night before about the National Guard service of President Bush were forgeries. By nightfall, more than 500 Web sites had linked to the Powerline story. The mainstream media followed up, which led to a still-pending internal investigation at CBS and an apology by Rather. "I no longer have confidence in these documents," he said.

The event helped thrust blogs into the mainstream media. In its year-end Man of the Year issue, Time Magazine included a story on Powerline. ABC listed bloggers among their "People of the Year."

"The Dan Rather incident shows the power of the Internet as a medium," Powerline founder John Hinderaker said in an e-mail interview. "Our role was to collect the information that came in from our readers, sift through it and select what we thought was most important and reliable and publish it to an audience that rapidly numbered in the millions. This sort of real-time reporting was not possible before the Internet, and blogs, came into being."

The Rather story was one of several in which blogs led the mainstream media.