The Voce Nation recently invited Tom Foremski and Dida Kutz, two of the key contributors behind the influential Silicon Valley Watcher blog, over for lunch to talk about how exactly blogging is impacting the media landscape and what it ultimately means for journalists, marketers and the companies pioneering this new area of communication.

I won’t rehash the entire conversation (I’ll instead point here and here for the details), but needless to say it was a valuable and timely conversation - the type of discussion that IMO needs to continue in a similar collaborative fashion between all the groups involved to reach real consensus, err, real understanding of the media seachange that’s underway.

With this in mind (and in the spirit of keeping the conversation going) I thought it would be interesting to ask Tom, a veteran tech journalist, one simple question: why do you blog?

I blog because it is by far, the most satisfying form of journalism that I have found. The blogging format allows me to write news, news analysis, features, and columns in the same way and same style as when I worked at the Financial Times. But it also allows for a wide range of styles, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, conversational, rambling, serious, funny, mischievous and downright silly. I can experiment with new types of writing and presentation. For example, in a recent piece about Steve Jobs I threw in a line that said: stevepleasedonthavemekillediamjustapoorbloggertryingtokeepitrealsmileysmileysmiley

As a journalist, I want to break stories and I want to publish them at any time of the day or night. Blogging allows me to do that. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, there is so much more to blogging than I ever expected. My friends Om Malik and David Galbraith would talk about blogging all the time with a passion and enthusiasm that I couldn’t see, until I tried it.

In the short time (relatively speaking) that SVW has been active its readership has skyrocketed and it has quickly become a must-read source for the Valley tech scene.  I’ll also point out that Tom’s comments about the nimbleness and flexibility of a blog for news reporting purposes were exemplified just this past week when SVW scored several major scoops on news that Google would be launching an Adwords API and a new Adsense program.  I think what Tom and his team are doing with SVW has interesting implications for reporters and newsmakers, and perhaps more important, it’s having a direct influence on the bigger conversation that’s taking place right now.

– Mike Manuel