'the bloggers'

Today I read an article that made a reference to 'the bloggers' in an account of a family feud lived on the internet over an autism charity. Some member of the family had posted one thing on some other website about autism treatments, and then the family charity said on their website that that member did not represent the views of the charity, and that the feud heated up when, 'the bloggers caught wind of it' or something, and insults were being flug left and right.

It was striking to me that a whole slew of people that write about any number of things would be classified with such a blanket term as, 'the bloggers.' Are these people specifically people who concern themselves with celebrity gossip, or charities, or autism, or the media, or what? What does it mean that things got worse once lots of people (and what people?) started writing about it? These are things that are more about the blogger as the everyman journalist, I suppose, but it still seemed like something interesting at the least.