I don't have a copy of the 18th Edition of the Bluebook over here, but if PG's quotation at De Novo is correct, the new rules for citing blogs seem spectacularly daft. At least according to that quotation--I can't find an online source at the moment--the correct citation for this blog entry would be:

Three Years of Hell, http://www.threeyearsofhell.com/ (July 28, 2005, 20:40 EST).

And what's that EST doing there? On my blog, that's only really identifiable if you look at the source code for an individual entry, or maybe in the RSS feed. (Where, of course, it's not in EST format, but as GMT - 05:00.) I have no idea how you'd figure that out on a standard-issue Livejournal or Blogspot site. You could just try to figure out where the blogger lives, but what about bloggers who modify their timestamp when they're in a different country?

It's as if there was a conscious attempt to make the citation format as unhelpful as possible for an actual practitioner to find, as difficult as possible for a member of staff to check [1], and as unlikely as possible for an article author to comply with the standard. I suppose one should just sigh in resignation when the Bluebook insists on citing to a paper source no one uses in favor of electronic sources freely available and more commonly referenced, but when there is only an electronic source, would it be too much to ask that the Book try to match itself to electronic reality?[2]

UPDATE: A reader asks what my preferred citation format would be. I'd probably respect the fact that blog posts generally have titles, their authors might like to see their name in print (especially academic authors who otherwise wouldn't be picked up in a citation check), and all information to be collected should be available on the webpage. So something like Author (if available and not a pseudonym), Title (if any), on Site Name, URL (to source if available, to root otherwise), (date, no time unless necessary). So this post would read:

Anthony Rickey, Magnificently Obtuse, on Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil, http://www.threeyearsofhell.com/archive/003609.php (Jan. 27, 2005).

There may be some problems with that--I'm by no means an expert in the Bluebook, so it may conflict with another citation format--but it accomplishes everything the "proper" citation does, while giving better information to the reader and avoiding unnecessary staff time.

[1]: Here, again, that EST requirement befuddles me. If the information required by a citation is only commonly available for those who know how to read the right bit of a blog's source code--and that only if it's run on MT--who is going to train the staff to do this?

[2]: True, there are blogs that don't feature permalinks for their entries, but they're certainly not standard, whereas I can't think of a single set of blogging software that makes timezone stamps an out-of-the-box feature. Certainly a rule stating "use permalinks when possible, and if necessary identify the post by date and time; otherwise, use only the date" would be more sensible.