MR. STEIN: Well, I guess ours is like a magazine in terms of there are recurring features, which I think a lot of us have. It's different than a magazine in terms of the immediacy of it, that it comes out -- not only does it come out every day, but there are new articles, there are new posts, every hour and you can really respond in an immediate manner to facts on the ground, wherever that ground is. It's not made out of paper --

(Laughter.)

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-- although I heard that is the next thing -- paper blogs.

MR. ERIK TORKELLS: Are the people from Sherman's Travel here? Because they are going in that direction. But back to that question of whether this is the mainstream yet. Do you feel like an outsider anymore?

MR. JOSHUA STEIN: Gridskipper in particular is a little more, I guess, edgy, which kind of means it's more limited and maybe closer to the outside than -- can I say more widely read and more centrally positioned? But, I think, in terms of who we influence, I don't think we are on the outside.

MR. MARK JOHNSON: Can I just jump in? To me, a blog is nothing more than a format. The reason that we started HotelChatter is because I had done sites in the past that cost a boat load of money to do, and for HotelChatter, using the blog format just made sense. But I really look at it as deeper than a blog, and a blog is nothing more than the format you use -- reverse chronological order and all of that stuff. So, we look at our blog from the mainstream even more as our independent voice, as well as our immediacy. Like when we do the "Gramercy Park Hotel Live Blog," -- you are not going to see the review on that in the New York Times for who knows how long, but we've got probably 25, 30 stories on the Gramercy Park Hotel

MR. TORKELLS: Fair enough. So, we can agree that the word "blog" is -- we are just going to take that as meaning, sort of, online travel communication at this point, right? What is it that readers or users, user/readers, are responding to, specifically for each of your brands?

MR. ERIK OLSEN: I think that a blog develops an identity and it develops a voice. You're saying you are edgy, and, I mean, we feel like we are kind of sarcastic in the way we approach things. We want to provide real information for people. We want to make sure that someone comes and actually gets something out of it and says, "I learned something" or "You are directing me to a great place."

When you're talking about this blog journalism, it depends on the type of blog you're talking about. You can't just say that all blogs are the same. They provide all types of different information, and a blog, in a lot of ways, is meta-journalism. It's journalism about journalism, you know. Someone said that there would be 50 percent less blogs -- I'm sort of paraphrasing --

(Laughter.)

-- there would be less blogs, you know, if there were no New York Times. So it's not going to replace the New York Times because everybody is blogging about the New York Times or whoever, right? So it's not a replacement. It's a very nice, sort of adjunct that the New York Times and everybody else is glad it exists because it drives a lot of traffic and interest and dialog about what they do. So we've tried to develop a voice. We call ourselves an "engaged travel blog." Travelers log on to know, we want to tell people about trips and places and cool stuff that's out there and so that's what people come for. They look for a place where there's sort of an aggregate, an aggregation of cool stuff that appeals to their sensibilities but is packaged in kind of a fun way that you can get through every time you check in. It's more than just, "Here's a link." It's, "Here's a story and some journalism." Call it, for lack of a better word, journalism around the link. So that's, as far as Gadling goes, that's what we strive for.

MR. TORKELLS: Does anyone else want to talk about what they think their users respond to? One of the beauties, of course, of online journalism is the immediacy and the immediate reaction you do get. It's probably like a lot of things, where you tend to hear the bad stuff more than the good. They tend to talk when they're unhappy. I mean, you talk about the live blogging and the other stuff you're all doing. What's working? What are people really responding to?