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Many things throughout history have provided people with a means of escape from their "real" lives, but I don't see how that exempts them from categorization. Blogs are descended from other escape methods (movies, books, drugs, sketchy clubs) as much as they're descended from curio cabinets and captain's logs, and to refuse to connect them to/categorize them with any of those things would prevent valuable insight into how blogs work and how we can/do use them.

I think there's a difference between ever categorizing things at all and building brick walls around things. I'm not sure how to maintain the balance between those things, but some kind of categorization seems necessary for our tiny human brains to digest any significant part of the information we receive-- we have to be able to file pieces of information. Blogs fit into the categorization canon just like everything else, and there are genres of blogs just like there are genres of books.