Category Archives: Blogging

Cultural impact of blogging

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From an exchange between Kurt Andersen and Andrew Sullivan on the subject “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” This is Sullivan talking:

I think over the past couple of decades, liberalism in its classic sense has been under threat. Not just from crazy theocrats abroad but from P.C. paternalism and religious-right activism at home. The formation of solid camps of thought, and the punishment of heretics, and the maintenance of orthodoxy on all sides have inhibited a free discourse in ideas. And part of the reason for that was the limit on the numbers of vehicles for expression. After all, there aren’t that many genuinely intellectual mags in this country, and the battle to influence them can be intense. But the fragmentation of media, accelerated by blogs, can break this up some and allow more complicated or unusual voices to emerge, without their having to ask permission or fight for space or suck up to people already in charge. If, say, the writers at Indegayforum had had no option but to try and get into the established gay press—which has been, until recently, extremely P.C.—it would have taken up a huge amount of time and led to enormous angst and wasted energy. Blogging circumvented that. It widens the sphere of possible voices exponentially. That’s wonderful news for the culture as a whole. And for liberalism in its deepest sense.

The riches of the Web

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I’m writing an article about the blogging phenomenon at the moment and, naturally, use the web as a research resource. It’s wonderful what there is out there if you go searching. For example, this excellent piece in New York Magazine, which looks at the operation of power law distributions in blogging. And then there’s Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere survey and his more recent analysis of the growth of the blogosphere as media, in which he discusses some of the emerging trends in handling information overload. These are all thoughtful and helpful essays, and I can get them without leaving my study. Fifteen years ago, this would have been unthinkable. And I still can’t quite take it for granted.

The blogging revolution

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Well, well. A Guardian/ICM poll brings some unexpected news…

The extent of the personal publishing revolution has been revealed by a Guardian/ICM poll showing that a third of all young people online have launched their own blog or website. Millions of young people who have grown up with the internet and mobile phones are no longer content with the one-way traffic of traditional media and are publishing and aggregating their own content, according to the exclusive survey of those aged between 14 and 21…

The Guardian has a leader on the implications of this phenomenon.

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley claims that 27% of US internet users read Blogs.

CNET is claiming that there are “more than 14 million” blogs in existence and another 80,000 being created each day. It has now compiled the usual fatuous list of the ‘Top 100’ Blogs. Sigh.

More: From a report of a presentation by Dave Sifri of Technorati…

Technorati is tracking 18.9 million weblogs, and seeing a doubling in these numbers every five months.

70,000 new weblogs are created every day; about one every second. 55% of those bloggers appear to still be active 3 months later. About 8% of those blogs are spam.

Looking at use, Technorati are seeing over 1,000,000 blog posts every day, with clear spikes around newsworthy events.

High profile blogs like Boing Boing and Gizmodo have similar levels of attention to mainstream media sites such as Reuters and the BBC. Traditional media companies are now beginning to integrate blog content into their offerings, with the Washington Post and others announcing their entry into this space today.

The use of tagging in blog posts is increasing, with almost a third of posts today including at least one tag.

En passant… it’s funny how these numbers never quite match up. CNET has “more than 14 million” Blogs, with 80,000 being created every day, while Technorati is monitoring “18.9 million” and seeing a mere 70,000 new ones a day. Hmmm….

Blawgs, aka lawyers’ blogs

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Interesting piece in the New York Times. Quote:

A survey conducted by Blogads.com, which administers online advertising on blog sites, and completed voluntarily by 30,000 blog visitors last spring, found that 5.1 percent of the people reading the blogs were lawyers or judges, putting that group fourth behind computer professionals, students and retirees. The survey also found that of the 6,232 people who said they also kept their own blogs, 6.1 percent said they were in the legal profession, putting lawyers fourth again, behind the 17.5 percent who said they were in the field of education, 15.1 percent in computer software and 6.4 percent in media, said Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads. He conceded that the survey was hardly scientific, but argued that at least it undermined the popular image of the blogosphere as dominated by antsy teenagers and programmers in their pajamas, tapping away at keyboards all night.

Old wine, new bottle

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I love WordPress, but found the default (Kubrick) presentation template too restrictive (particularly because it forced me to squeeze photographs into a maximum width of 450 pixels). Also, it seemed to waste a lot of screen space, forcing readers to scroll too much. And the interminable Archives list down the right hand side was getting, well, ridiculous. So with Quentin’s advice and expertise, some of these problems have been addressed. Hope you think it’s an improvement.

Fighting the last war

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CNN reporter Miles O’Brien has been sent to New Orleans to cover the looming threat of hurricane Katrina. He’s keeping a Blog. Here’s an excerpt:

This morning as we arrived at Newark with one way tickets booked only 12 hours prior to departure, we all received secondary screening from the TSA. I am going to go out on a limb and make a prediction: terrorists will pop for a round-trip booking if they try to use airplanes as cruise missiles again. Perhaps we should learn from the past war — instead of fighting it over and over again — mindlessly.

You can fool some of the people…

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… but it’s getting harder with all those pesky Blogs around. Intriguing story from this morning’s New York Times:

Clear Channel, thought by its critics to be the best representative of the creeping corporate weaseldom that has brought on the ruination of commercial radio, tried to dupe radio listeners in Akron, Ohio, by posing as an anticorporate pirate radio station.

Via some audio trickery, Clear Channel made it sound as though pirate signals from “Radio Free Ohio” were bleeding into several of the other stations it owns. The “pirate” signals, and a Web site set up to promote the new station, lashed out at corporate radio.

Suspicious, someone using the handle “Turbo Ninja” looked up the Web site registration for radiofreeohio.org, discovered it was owned by Clear Channel, and posted the findings to the message boards on the Web site of the independent station WOXY.

“They’re ripping corporate radio as a means of encouraging people to listen to a slightly different kind of corporate radio,” Turbo Ninja wrote.

The posting was picked up by several blogs, and in turn by The New York Times, which quoted a Clear Channel executive saying, “There’s a hole in the market here and we’re going to fill it.”

That hole is “progressive talk,” a notion that sent Carrie MacLaren reeling. She runs the blog stayfreemagazine.org, one of the first to publicize what Clear Channel was up to. “Progressive talk,” she wrote. “Yes, I will say that again: (Radio Free Ohio) is to be a progressive talk station! Now if you’ll excuse me I think I’ll go shove an icepick in my ear.”