You might have seen this quote from Tyler Hansbrough last week, about how basically nobody who follows sports thinks he can be a great NBA player:

These are probably a bunch of guys who just sit in their basements and probably just write out mock drafts and do this or do that. I could really care less what they’re going to think but I’m just going to go out and do what I do and see what happens.

Or this one from Raul Ibanez, on a blog post that implied (and evidently not to his knowledge, tried to refute) that his power surge this year could be coming from PEDs:

You can have my urine, my hair, my blood, my stool - anything you can test. There should be more credibility than some 42-year-old blogger typing in his mother's basement. It demeans everything you've done with one stroke of the pen.

Besides revealing Hansbrough's apparent inferiority complex and Ibanez's apparent total lack of knowledge about how the Internet works (we tend not to use pens much, Raul), this shows another disturbing trend, at least to me.

Everyone hates bloggers.

Honestly that's a mostly unfounded hatred, though there's a point to be made about accountability.

The most important thing is that contrary to popular belief, bloggers don't all live in their mothers' basements. Take me, for example. My mother doesn't have a basement, so I'm in my mother's living room. So take that, Raul!

But in all seriousness, these people (and by that, I mean everyone involved in any aspect of life that can be blogged about) seem not to understand that, just like anything else, there are different levels of blogging.

There are blogs that are just really bad; the writers don't know what they're talking about, they have no credibility, and they just make stuff up to try to get readers. Back in my Deadspin-reading days (before the site started sucking) I remember seeing a blog that, if memory serves, was a Phillies fan site that may have been translated from Swahili. It was the worst thing I'd ever read. Alas, I cannot find it now; if anyone knows what I'm talking about, post it in the comments for all to see and mock.

There are blogs that are kind of in the middle: that is, the writers mean well, and act as professionally as possible, and write well. They actually know what they're talking about, and give a unique view on their chosen subject matters.

However, there's a catch—they don't have name recognition, nor do they have the shield from scrutiny of an ESPN or Huffington Post banner atop their pages.

I'd say that we fall into that category, as I arrogantly believe that all four of us know what we're talking about, and that we meet journalistic standards as well as possible (considering I'm the only member of this blog with any real training in journalism). Judging by the fact that Rick Reilly hasn't tried to kill me yet, I'll assume that we're doing a good job.

Finally, there's the top-level blog. Andrew Sullivan, Bill Simmons, Nate Silver, and the rest of their ilk go here. They're the gray area between blogging and "real journalism." Technically, they write in the blog style, but they tend to have that aforementioned shield.

Simmons writes for ESPN, so he doesn't have to worry as much about complaints about working in his mom's basement. Nate Silver knows everything about everything, so people dare not cross him. But because of that, they don't have the freedom that a person like me has. Which is maybe the root of the problem.

People like me (and Peter and Nate and Joe) who are in that second group tend to take the freedom of the blog as a great power that brings great responsibility. We can do a lot, but if we're not careful, we can end up getting put in the same position as Jerod Morris, who wrote the post that offended Ibanez so much. If you're a blogger and you end up on "Outside the Lines," that's not a good thing.

This isn't just an issue with athletes, though— the "legitimate journalists" of the world hate us. People like the bane of my existence, Rick Reilly. People like Buzz Bissinger. This is not surprising, because blogging represents a big reason why newspapers and traditional media are dying.

We can respond faster, because we're always working, all day, every day. We're more mobile and versatile, as the Iranian election shows. Traditional journalists can't get the news there, so they get it from Twitter. And besides that, it's a well known fact that change comes painfully, and often rather than embracing change, people try to stop it, even though that's impossible.

Take the record labels, for example: the Internet represented a likely shift in their production model, but they ignored it and let Napster set the precedent for them. Now they're dying, because people aren't willing to buy music anymore.

Instead of crying about it, deal with it. No matter how badly people like Rick Reilly and Tyler Hansbrough and Raul Ibanez want to marginalize blogs, we're here and we cannot be killed. We're not all in basements. We don't all deserve as wide latitude as some others, but simply having a blog does not make someone completely devoid of purpose.

Of course, if you're cool enough to be reading this, you probably know that already.