What is the coolest thing about Blogs?

The coolest thing is anybody being able to say what the want to say to as many people as want to listen. This has been promised (and true, theoretically) since the beginning of the Internet, of course. But I think a lot of the excitement about weblogs is that we're seeing this theory become reality.

Blogs are mostly used to broadcast information. Are there technologies that allow blogs to be used to support online communities?

Sure. In a couple different ways. First, there are simply community-based weblogs. Metafilter one example. It's just like most any other weblog except anyone who is a member can post to it and then there is discussion on each item, somewhat like Slashdot (but less complicated). In a less democratic vein, there are small collaborative weblogs that are great for smaller groups. Blogger has functionality that lets you invite as many people as you want to contribute to a blog. Sometimes collaborative blogs are just a means of having multiple contributors to a broadcast information. But sometimes they're more about the interaction between the contributors themselves.

Another piece, is "comments" functionality, which is built into several weblog tools -- and as third-party services and tools that work with Blogger and others. Comments are a simple but powerful way to include reader interaction into a blog. They're still substantially different than a discussion forum, in that there's clearly a main voice (or group of voices) and the comments are an adjunct to that. But they allow anyone to expand on a thread, argue, etc.

Finally, it's undeniable that groups of weblogs themselves represent a different type of online community. Since weblogs started gaining steam, there has been a "weblog community," which just consisted of the people who published blogs (and, to a certain extent, those who only read them). Even though they were all writing on different sites and there was no formal relationship between them, there were (and still are) distributed discussions and interactions going on that are very clearly linked and feel community-like. (At this point, there are dozens of not hundreds of disparate "weblog communities.") 

The difference I see between informally linked blogs and other sorts of online communities, is that when people have their own space to write and express themselves, as opposed to some sort of shared space, they feel a lot more ownership and freedom in that space. This encourages more of themselves to show through, which I think can actually result in a stronger community than something that is more structurally linked. We've recently done some licensing deals that we hope will create this same effect within other sites.

Are there examples of individuals or organizations using blogs to generate revenue?

There are certainly many blogs that are of a professional or commercial nature. There are blogs that are part of traditional advertising-supported media sites, like Dan Gillmor's site  and The Guardian UK's site that must contribute to those publication's revenue. And there are people or companies who have become known and, therefore, gotten business or hired because of their blogs. 

As for blogs making money on their own, clearly most people don't have that motivation, but some have tried and been successful. Andrew Sullivan, a professional writer, is probably the best-known example. He claims to make decent money through voluntary contributions to his blog. Many others have done the same with varying results. There is also a company called Corante which has started specifically with the goal of creating high-quality, specialized blogs that will make money (though I'm not sure if they're at that point yet). 

Blogs (and your efforts) get a huge amount of press. Why do you think that is?

For weblogs in general, I think part of it is that journalists are intrigued by the whole concept. True, some of them are a bit threatened (or at least put off) by just anyone being able to write, editor-free, and gain an audience, regardless of formal training or "paying their dues." But more often they get why it's cool. As for Pyra/Blogger specifically, I'm not sure. For a while, we had the whole San Francisco, young-person-led, dot-com thing going, which the press was eating up. And we've had some rather publicly known ups and downs that have made for some interesting stories. At this point, I think we've just been around long enough, and have a relatively well-known name in this space that it just becomes the default. (Soon, we plan to be doing more things that get a lot of attention just because they're damn interesting. ;)  )

What do you see for blogs as you look out a few years?

For one thing, blogs will become ubiquitous to the point of transparency. I don't think many people will be talking about blogs like we do today, because they will just be one of the basic things on the web. Not every site will be a blog, but the blog format will be the default for personal sites, for example (which will become more and more common) and, more often than not, they'll be incorporated into media and corporate sites. They will also be all over inside of corporations, on intranets.

At the same time, blogs are going to be morphed into all kinds of interesting configurations. They will be less easy to define and serve widely different purposes. We're just at the infancy of weblog publishing, technology-wise. At Blogger, we're working on a bunch of features under the umbrella of "networked publishing." Essentially, these are about leveraging the network of blogs and blog readers -- as well as the web itself -- to do new things that result in more collective intelligence and higher quality content. Userland is also doing some interesting stuff along these lines, as well as a slew of third-party hobbyists and new companies. As I said at the top, it's an exciting time in BlogLand.