As an alternative film festival, the Sundance Film Festival has long played host to innovations that have spread elsewhere. Blogging is one of them. A blog (short for weblog) is a web journal made up of sequential posts, which a writer can put up on the web as often, or as rarely, as he or she likes. Personal blogs, millions of them, are spreading on the Internet like kudzu, from Livejournal.com to MySpace.com. Professional blogs like Gawker Media's gossipy Defamer.com draws some 270,000 page views per day.

As blogs become more successful, they are challenging traditional media, and this year's Sundance marks a fascinating juncture, as newly powerful blogs like Cinematical.com take on the likes of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. "Blogs are becoming a vital part of an independent film scene that relies on word-of-mouth and alternative media to truly thrive," says Eugene Hernandez, editor of the indie film Web site indieWIRE.com, which hosts some two dozen blogs and this year has asked 12 filmmakers from Sundance and the concurrent Slamdance to blog about their experiences.

BloggingSundance.com, a pioneering festival blog, was dreamed up by Weblogs Inc. Network founder Jason Calacanis, who persuaded the festival to let him blog in 2003. "I blogged live from inside movie theaters, I'd sit in the back row with my laptop," he recalls. "It's the closest thing to live coverage." Film fanatic Calacanis, who is now 35, continued to blog Sundance through 2004 and 2005, when he reviewed 19 to 20 movies by himself. "When I'm at Sundance I don't go to parties, I watch films," he claims.

Last year, WIN morphed BloggingSundance into Cinematical.com, a smart group blog for movie fans that is already getting 50,000 hits a day. (WIN and its 80 blogs was sold in October 2005 to AOL for a reported $25 million.) During this year's Sundance, a Cinematical team of five led by Calacanis will be posting from Sundance. "Over the course of the next 12 days," writes Karina Longworth in an entry that also plugs new corporate partners AOL and Moviefone, "we will blog the living hell out of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival." Cinematical will still post its Sundance entries at its old URL, BloggingSundance.com.

Cinematical doesn't edit its writers, says Calacanis. "I want them to write what they're passionate about. People want more voices. There's a transparency in blogging. People aren't afraid to say something is a terrible movie. Mainstream journalists don't have the passion to cover Sundance as aggressively and passionately as the bloggers. What Sundance is to the film industry, blogging is to the traditional media."

When IndieWIRE first covered Sundance 10 years ago, Hernandez recalls, " 'Webcasting' had just hit. Our group was among the first to cover the festival in this new way. It's become all about blogs."

Other passionate voices in this year's Sundance blogosphere include MovieCityNews' Hot Blog from David Poland, Jeffrey Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere, Scott Macaulay at FilmmakerMagazine.com and GreenCineDaily.

Mainstream journalists are also getting into the blogging act, from Salt Lake City Tribune critic Sean P. Means, who has blogged about the controversy surrounding New Line Cinema's closing night film "Alpha Dog," which could be pulled from the festival, to The Hollywood Reporter's Sundance edition of the RiskyBizBlog, which will feature postings from this writer as well as THR New York film reporter Gregg Goldstein and THR chief film critic Kirk Honeycutt.

Robert Redford may lament all the buzz surrounding Sundance, but with all the blogs in attendance, that buzz will be louder than ever.