Until a while ago, one of my extra-curricular activities involved visiting Manhattan clubs with a lissom New Yorker called Alizinha. Not that we had ever met, you understand, but Alizinha hosted a vivacious blog called the Brazilian Muse, full of a fan’s insights into the work of some of my favourite carioca artists. As well as reporting on major concerts, she enjoyed deconstructing Portuguese lyrics and serving up classy MP3s. In short, she was the perfect guide.

Sadly, her site is dormant now (blogs are constantly arriving and disappearing with the minimum of fanfare). Fortunately, there are always other enthusiasts to lead me astray in various areas of the arts. Most are American for the simple fact that Britain still lags two or three years behind when it comes to what even Luddites now know as the “blogosphere”. A little more than a year ago, I had a series of conversations at a party with fellow journalists, none of whom had the remotest idea what a blog looked like. Why on earth, one of them asked me incredulously, would anyone want to write for free?

Well, I can think of all sorts of reasons, including self-promotion and the joy, and occasional terror, of being your own editor. Have laptop, will pontificate. (You can make money out of it as well.) But there is the additional attraction of being able to bypass the cultural conveyor belt. We like to think of artistic endeavour as a will-o’-the-wisp activity where inspiration comes from the gods, yet the truth is that the business is run as rigidly as any other industry.

Arts centres roll out their latest, best-ever autumn season, publicists prime journalists with advance copies of the latest Great American Novel, press junkets give reporters ten minutes each with Ewan McGregor. At its best, the system helps the informed reader to sort the gold from the dross. At its worst, it degenerates into an exercise in log-rolling. And as newspapers expand into ever larger, multi-section entities, critical voices grow more and more diffuse. Blogs, at least in these early, innocent days, add a nonconformist voice to the conversation. While some of the more messianic members of the online “community” talk of overthrowing the “dead tree” media, the real function of blogging is that it supplements mainstream output (without which most blogs, whether they admit to it or not, would wither away overnight).

At the moment my regular arts diet includes the Playgoer’s highly opinionated but well informed take on the ins and out of Broadway and off-Broadway (playgoer.blogspot.com). One of its main preoccupations of late has been the controversy over the planned New York transfer of the Royal Court hit My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Unlike the Playgoer, I thought the piece was an utterly conventional slab of agitprop. But there is an important principle at stake in allowing it to be staged in Manhattan without fear of upsetting political groups. The Playgoer showed more interest in that question than did many establishment journalists. Bloggers may be mildly obsessive, but the fact that some New York producers now offer them free seats to new shows is a sign of the role that they can play in helping a production to find its audience. On the political front, conservative sites such as the film forum Libertas (libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas/) are also challenging the stifling, one-party state mentality of so many Hollywood insiders.

That has to be good for the Left as well as the Right: one reason why much of our political drama is so dull is that it insists on approaching issues from the same relentlessly predictable point of view.

Blogs, by the way, don’t have to be cranky, amateur one-man bands. One site we would do well to imitate, artsjournal.com, brings together a battalion of reviewers and practitioners, among them my favourite American arts writer, The Wall Street Journal’s indefatigable critic Terry Teachout (artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight).

Arts Journal provides a platform for the sort of give and take you normally hear in the bar after a show or a concert. One recent group discussion touched on the subject of whether technology will eventually render critics redundant.

Are we moving towards an internet-driven system where the public will prefer to debate a film or exhibition rather than read one person’s assessment? I hope it never comes to that — life is too short for blog-ins about Big Brother or the new Superman Returns film.

Some pundits believe, too, that TV drama series and the like will be increasingly shaped by online audiences. I’m not so sure. All I do know is that we journalists are going to have to get used to sharing the stage with them.

www.clivedavis-online.com