Power to the Blogosphere!
Power to the Blogosphere! Power to the People!
There are a raft of letters today to the editor to the Wall Street Journal about the Eason Jordan flap. (I'm not including a link because you need a paid subscription to access the WSJ.) A typical comment: "Thank God for Bloggers."
These comments are continued evidence of the huge impact the blogosphere is having, which cuts across the political spectrum. My recent posts about Jeff Gannon, 99 Zeros, and Eason Jordan are each a commentary on this phenomenon: White House sleaze operative exposed thanks to bloggers, Googler fired for publishing a blog, and news executive sacked thanks to blog reports of off-the-record (and dubious) remarks.
Is the power of the blogosphere good or bad? No doubt both. It is true democracy, which means it can reflect the actions of an unreasoning mob. On the otherhand, no one will keep secrets for long in the world of the blogosphere and syndication feeds. Everyone can publish their own op-ed pieces, and yes, they do get read. On the whole, I think it is a great thing, but bloggers are subject to no discipline, editors, or any kind of checks and balances -- which means reader beware!
Since the blogosphere (the world-wide community of bloggers) has become so significant, it is important to understand the blogosphere taxonomy. How many bloggers are there? What is the average rate of blogger activity? How do blogs get noticed and read? What are the blogging communities? How does blogging and syndication fit together? How do bloggers communicate with each other? What are blogger demographics? Geographic dispersion? What are the major blog hosting communities? How many independently hosted blogs are there (like this one) as opposed to blogs hosted by an organized blog community (such as Google's Blogger.com)? What constraints are there on publishing a blog within an organized blogging community?
Taxonomic, organizational, demographic, and functional information about the blogosphere is hard to come by -- but we need to have an understanding of these things to know how our world works. I'll try to shed some light on these topics in furture postings.
Posted by Harold Davis at February 16, 2005 09:54 AM
