It may just be that we're all more jaded overall. The other day, there was a story on the cover of USA Today regarding weblogs, and it even had a quote from Ben. I suspect that a year ago, I'd have been jumping up and down with excitement, thinking about what great recognition that sort of press coverage represents. But I barely skimmed the article yesterday, noted a bunch of annoying inaccuracies, and bookmarked it for the future. I know that the grand theory of weblogs is that I could have Fact-Checked Their Asses™ but who cares? USA Today readers aren't going to stumble across my site and find the true facts, the newspaper isn't going to run a correction based on my blog post, and my readers already know the details of how weblogs work.
That's not to say there's no point to this stuff. Indeed, I'm more excited about weblogs in general than I've ever been, because we're not in exciting uncharted territory anymore. We're in the process of making a new industry, but it would seem social software has taken the mantle of "Hot New Thing" from weblogs and that blogs themselves are just seen as an inevitable part of the media landscape. Losing one's novelty value in exchange for credibility or acceptance is always a good thing.
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Someday soon we'll have almost forgotten about the time period when we could track media mentions of weblogs, and when we'd revel in early coverage as a sign of legitimacy.

But I'm hoping that I can rediscover the fun of just writing for myself and a few friends like I have been doing for a few years now.