Weblogs -- those freewheeling, constantly updating news and commentary sites -- come in too many varieties to be squeezed under one umbrella, though Dan Rather probably wishes they would go away. It took only 24 hours for some bloggers to begin dismantling CBS' bogus Bush documents. Superimposing images of the forgeries and Microsoft Word duplicates, one blogger quickly demonstrated how the documents must have been created, and with what tools.

And when a Tom Brokaw rushes to Rather's defense with the charge that bloggers are "on a jihad," you know the networks are feeling the heat. At least the Rathergate story had elements of high comedy, an element sadly lacking in this interminable election year. Brokaw notwithstanding, weblogs exist on both the left and the right in their thousands, and have excited an often lackluster campaign.

But mercifully, weblogs do not have to be political at all. A recent Associated Press story comments on how authors have begun using them, an interesting phenomenon that has now spread into the ranks of both fiction and nonfiction writers. The trend bypasses conventional lines of communication -- publisher to bookstore to reader -- by opening a direct channel between writers and the public. Indeed, some authors turn weblogs into online bookstores, hawking their own wares and setting up discussion groups about their work.

I figure the Amazon.coms of this world can handle online sales, and too much of the Web is already in the dubious hands of marketers, but weblogs have other roles to play in the publishing arena. As I found out when I began my own weblog on the exploration of deep space (www.centauri-dreams.org), the format becomes ideal for continuing to track the stories that a book cannot.

Finish a chapter and you run into the author's dilemma: as soon as a book goes from digital file to paper, it has begun to age. But the weblog lets me make an easy transition between printed page and ongoing news, one that has kept me in touch with key sources as their work evolves.

A friend recently wrote about his interest in keeping abreast of open-source software. His idea was ingenious: Although he didn't want to publish a weblog on the Internet, he wanted to create a private one. He realized that if he could keep his own kind of journal, noting stories he wanted to follow up on and putting his own comments next to the links, he would have created a venue for an ongoing textbook that would teach him the subject.

I'm all for self-education, and we've never had such a medium for doing it as the Internet. When I started making daily entries in my own weblog, I thought I would approach it as something of a duty, but a necessary one if I were to keep up with my book's evolving subject matter.

What a surprise to find that doing the weblog entry is the high point of my day. If I had had any sense, I would have started the weblog before writing the book because it has become a priceless research tool, one that helps me find new sources for future projects on an almost daily basis. I'm paying for a site, but a basic weblog is free. You can set one up at www.blogger.com, a service now owned by Google.

Redefining the relationship between author and audience is only one of the effects weblogs are having. In their tens of thousands of subjects and styles, these daily commentaries are all about focusing the attention on a subject and sharpening that attention with continuing work. Call that a "jihad" if you will; to me, it's good news for education and good news for spirited public debate.