I’m Blogging This:The Evolution of Stories into Entries and Media into Syndication

“EFFECTIVE TODAY, August 30th, 2005 THE PRICE OF GASOLINE WILL BE $2.95 PER GALLON.”

“This was the second thing I saw when I walked into the garage today. The first thing was John the crazy Romanian dispatcher standing outside grabbing his balls at me. Frankly, I was more upset about the gas price.” M.P., a New York cab driver, has been documenting her day-to-day encounters with customers, police, and anyone who happens to come along. She writes about it all (and puts up pictures, too) on her website, her weblog, http://newyorkhack.blogspot.com/.

Anything from a collection of love poetry to daily political cartoons and satire could be called a weblog. It is generally defined as a website to which entries, or posts, are regularly or frequently uploaded (or “posted”), displayed in reverse chronological order–newest items at the top, older ones going down. Most weblogs are run by amateurs, individuals only writing because they want to, but that very passion is driving these internet journals, publications, and indices ahead of other mass media; while not totally driving them out, weblogs are slowly but effectively eclipsing the press, radio, and television in terms of usability and efficiency.

A Decade of “Blogging”, a little more of Bloggers

The word itself was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997, as he kept one of the earliest and most influential, describing it as “logging the web” (Jorn Barger, January 31 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorn_Barger), and only later shortened to “blog”. By mid-2001, journalism schools began recognizing blogs, and in March of 2003, “weblog”, “weblogging”, and “weblogger” had found ways into the Oxford English Dictionary. There are now millions of blogs, and while most are personal diaries or journals, many more shaping blogs have been politics-oriented, distinguishing the blogosphere early on through election coverage and campaigning (Howard Dean earned a sizable portion of his funds through his websites) and coverage of national events such as the war in Iraq and the December 2004 tsunamis (January 31 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog). Even back towards the beginning of the blog movement, Barger was commenting on the Arab-Israeli conflict, drawing all sorts of arguments and accusations on his moderated discussion forum (January 31 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorn_Barger).

Though Barger was one of the first literal bloggers, others long before him were already doing the same thing–other such as Benjamin Franklin. Due to the nature of online journals, authors incorporate a great degree of editorialization, giving many perspectives on common topics, and due to the directness between first hearing about a subject and actually posting it, having no intermediaries, articles tend to be on the blood-dripping cutting edge of news, and Franklin fairly nails that. As Daniel Rubin points out, “He pamphleteered, self-published, delivered colonial dish, news and opinion, sampled other's work and remixed it into his own mash.” The difference is that he couldn’t post everything that he wrote with the immediacy that we can now he collected all of his works together in his Poor Richard’s Almanack. Franklin even said that he wrote not as a renowned authority on his subjects, but as an interested amateur, both to entertain and to encourage some thought. He tended to write anonymously or through pen names, fearing that others would judge his thoughts based on who he was before what he had to say. Rubin maintains that “all bloggers are journalists. All we have to do is rely on precedent” (January 17 2006, “Happy Birthday, Blog Daddy”, http://blogs.philly.com/blinq/2006/01/ben_online.html).

As reporters of fact and opinion, then, most bloggers advocate the Open Source movement, a push that started with software but may now refer to making all information public domain. Numerous big-name brand insiders have blogs of their own on which they discuss company policy (Robert Scoble’s http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/), discuss rumors and sometimes leak new products (http://www.appleinsider.com/ or http://www.thinksecret.com/ of Apple), or generally stir around things which their higher-ups may not like (January 31 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog).

Mass media, on the other hand, has been the primary source of news for hundreds of years, since the invention of the printing press 1440 to online periodical and database syndication now. Especially in the last century, advances in technique and technology (VHS recorders, TiVo, cassette recorders, scanners, copiers, etc.) have lowered the price and increased the public consumption of such sources dramatically. With the exception of specialty or niche magazines, most forms of this “old” media are available to everyone and used by everyone; they often have target audiences significantly greater than those of individual blogs, which are precisely as specialized as people care to make them–and when each person is the content producer and publisher, there are many minds going to work with many views and opinions.

. . .And on the Sixth Day, God Created Man. And Man Blogged It.

They’re. . .Everywhere. . .

As mentioned earlier, one of the most powerful assets of blogging is the coverage. Bloggers are everywhere; services such as Xanga, one of the first and largest, offers extensive coverage of both the US and much of Asia with Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and several other languages built into their system. Blogger, which Google now owns, like some other providers, has a button which sends users to random public blogs–one of every five or six of which is in Spanish, Dutch, or Italian. These two, and other popular ones such as LiveJournal and MySpace, are free in terms of both software and hosting, taking minutes to set up and maintain. Even orkut, a social network service, also run by Google, helps compile blog entries–from a user body 70% Brazilian (January 30 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut).

Aside from people simply meeting friends, though, blogs offer much greater coverage. Dozens of blogs sprang up during Hurricane Katrina to cover what television reporters couldn’t and journalists were unable to hear until afterwards: http://www.deadlykatrina.com/, which detailed many of the horrific rapes and terrors which took place meanwhile, and http://hurricaneupdate.blogspot.com/, posting any pertinent information and even still updating when necessary. Another blog, Baghdad Burning (http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/), offers life after “liberation” as a woman in Iraq.

And. . .Everything. . .

According to Steve Rubel, even now, the bulk of nonsocial blogs are political and technological (Where The Blog And Media Worlds Diverge, http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/blogtalk/wpn-58-20060111WheretheBlogandMediaWorldsDiverge.html). But just as the largest chunks of newspapers tend to cover politics and sports, there are other parts: cultural blogs which highlight the arts, discuss pop culture; topical blogs, focusing on DIY projects and cooking; business and marketing blogs; science blogs; community collaborative; eclectic; blogs that focus on just Google and blogs that are set up as spamming mines, and dozens more categories alone (31 January 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog). According to Technorati, the Google of the blogosphere, currently tracks 26.8 million sites (31 January 2006, http://technorati.com/about/).

But the people are what distinguish blogs. Certainly not everyone who posts about something is an expert; even people like Doc Searls, one of the most respected men on the internet, didn’t come in with too much. Bloggers can really only talk about what they think and events that fall right into their laps–“Though given the increasing ubiquity of bloggers, their first-hand reporting may eventually come to rival that of the old-news apparatus,” notes Gregory Bloom. He says that we still have plenty of news sites and media otherwise to gather what raw information we need about big events; these single individuals, then, tell us about things in their lives and, perhaps more importantly, their thoughts on those. Their own opinions, and those of their peers, motivate them to produce content. So while traditional media coverage and analysis may be skewed and biased, if bloggers are, then all the more readership to them. If old news calls blogging unprofessional, then new news calls hard-copy information dull and drab; they push each other, and the people end is the side that reaps the profit (January 6 2006, “The future of news?”, http://gregorybloom.newsvine.com/_news/2006/01/06/50161-the-future-of-news).

Web 2.0: It’s for Slackers

Now, blogs alone are noteworthy things, but they would be nothing without the countless dozens of syndication sites and software available to put some order to them. Services such as Technorati, mentioned earlier, and LjSEEK index and archive the millions of constantly republished sites, providing newcomers with search tools for finding interesting, relevant, useful, or whatever-they-want sites.

And that’s not all. They ping users when their favorite sites have new posts and notify subscribers of new comments, but, of course, if watchers aren’t at computers at the time, they may miss things. So then along came RSS (Really Simple Syndication), XML, and Atom feeds–URLs that are updated immediately as sites are updated. Rather than simply viewing a feed, one punches it into a feed reader, or aggregator, and sees the most recent however many entries the feed is told to display, along with snippets, or even all of the text, if desired. This syndication is like a newspaper that displays articles only on topics of your choice or by your designated authors–something that a real newspaper is not very capable of doing.

All that is quite convenient for multi-taskers or people simply too busy to go and check their regular sites all the time without being sure of fresh content, but even the aggregators must refresh ever now and then, it seems. Well, unless they’re AJAX, that is. AJAX stands for asynchronous java and XML; anything AJAX will load with the rest of the web page, but stays alive; if the base site sends it any more information, then it shows that to the user without refreshing the rest of the screen. All this syndication, these archiving tools, and this “AJAX” falls under the category of Web 2.0 services and goods (Web 1.0 would be going to the news site and checking every few minutes, looking for sites using terms or words rather than concepts and fundamental ideas, and reloading pages and scrolling down to see if there are any more comments).

The Wikipedia is another example of a Web 2.0 product: it is dynamic, constantly being updated. I’ve used it many times both for quick reference, checking my facts, and as a solid source of in-depth information–even on this paper. People make changes, corrections, fix typos, etc. etc. etc. so often that it is rare to find any page at all which remains the exact same for more than a week; the most common pages have modifications of some sort every few minutes. No hard encyclopedia can come even remotely that close in terms of recentness.

What’s more, it does it well. A recent study by Nature magazine pitted Wikipedia against Britannica in terms of accuracy of science entries, and the results are more than slightly surprising. Covering topics like Dmitry Mendeleev, ethanol, lipids, and quarks, Wikipedia actually ended up with just one more error per entry on average–four versus Britannica’s three (Giles, December 15 2005, Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html). However, the detail of the articles sheds light of a slightly different hue. Britannica’s average word count was 541–so about 0.0054106 errors per word–whereas Wikipedia tallied 1078 words per entry, giving it a mean error of 0.0035798 per word, a dramatic difference. So, at least in the selected science articles, it has more errors, but also more than proportional information (January 24 2006, External Peer Review, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review).

What’s more, if constantly updating blogs aren’t enough, if user re-referenced encyclopedias don’t cover enough current events, then there are always news sites (2.0). Sites like Google News, which bring together any and all available sources from across the entire web provide the last necessary mash-up. Another, newer one, Newsvine, which is still in beta-testing mode, so open only on a by-invitation basis, allows users to “seed” articles, or link to them through its service, also creating a comment section and a live chat area (AJAX, both, of course). Or instead of simply reposting articles, users can compose their own, still open to discussion in the same way. Furthermore, in a few weeks (or perhaps even days), when Newsvine goes public, it will pay users who submit their pieces through ad revenue. 90% of the money will go to the user, who may either collect it or donate it to a charity, and the remaining 10% goes to the user’s referrer–whoever invited the other. It encourages people not only to consider carefully who to invite in the early molding stages, but also to submit high-quality and thoughtful work–kind of (just) like a good blog.

“Wine Blogging as Market Disruption”

Guy Kawasaki, a managing director of a venture capital firm and columnist for Forbes.com (“Official” Bio, http://guykawasaki.com/about/index.shtml), started a blog just a little over one month ago and gets no fewer than twice as many hits on his website each day, not to mention has several thousand subscribers to his feeds. He had always been something of a celebrity in the internet world, especially having helped extensively with the success of Macintosh computers, and finally gave in to pressure to begin posting; now he’s also a celebrity in the blogosphere.

The band The Arctic Monkeys sold 363,735 over-the-counter copies in its first week of sales, setting a new record. They did it all without the big music industry, though word of mouth, the internet, live shows, and free downloads (Hugh MacLeod, January 30 2006, “all marketing is disruption. everything else is secondary.”, http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002220.html).

Hugh MacLeod is a blogger and a marketer, in that order, but if you ask him, they’re the same thing. One of his clients, Stormhoek, used to make wine in Australia for Australia. Now they make wine in Australia for Australia, Europe, and they’re moving into the US and Asia. After he helped their company start an official blog, and after he started promoting them in various ways (writing entries about their factories, sending a few complimentary bottles to other bloggers, etc.), their sales increased. Dramatically. Indeed, their sales doubled in twelve months–tens of thousands of cases more than they had been selling before, in a year (Hugh MacLeod, December 29 2005, “blogging doubled stormhoek sales in less than twelve months”, http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/002112.html). He calls it “wine blogging as market disruption” (Hugh MacLeod, July 22 2005, “wine blogging as marketing disruption”, http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001773.html), and it’s a common meme that markets are conversations–well, so are conversations markets.

A Society, Cross Referenced

Blogging, at least as the term means now, can never take the place of traditional, mainstream media. From marketing a business and pushing political agendas to organizing thoughts and collecting fun things, a blog does much, much more. Simon Dumenco says that “[blogging]’s about opinion, not reporting” (January 16 2006, A BLOGGER IS JUST A WRITER WITH A COOLER NAME, http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=47467). To modify that statement, blogging is about people, interpretation, and interaction, not just reporting. Even social blogs span from relating stories of interesting events as a cabby to the existential musings of a death-row condemned inmates. In response to the question, “Why don’t you stand up and take your punishment like a man?”, blogger Vernon, http://meetvernon.blogspot.com/, scheduled to be executed some time next week, says:

. . .When I was in society I did used to whine. But I would whine about things that didn’t involve life. I would say: “They tax me too much” “It sure is hot out today” “It’s too cold.” But now that I’ve been living with a death sentence for twenty-two years, I have had an education on how meaningful life is. I have come to understand that others may put little into life, no matter what end of the stick they are on. When I whine now I whine because I have spent my life learning what others know to be true. . .I know what others know to be true but turn away from.

References

Bloom, Gregory (2006, January 6). The future of news? Newsvine. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://gregorybloom.newsvine.com/_news/2006/01/06/50161-the-future-of-news

Bone, James (2006, January 19). Google will fight Bush Administration demand for search records. New York Times. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://usersecurity.org/?q=node/10

External Peer Review (2006, January 24). Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:External_peer_review

Giles, Jim (2005, December 15). Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

Gonsalves, Antone (2006, January 19). Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Subpoenaed In Anti-Porn Effort. TechWeb News. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/177101984

journalism.co.uk. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story1654.shtml

Kawasaki, Guy. Blog. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://blog.guykawasaki.com/

Kerwin, Ann Marie (2006, January 16). A BLOGGER IS JUST A WRITER WITH A COOLER NAME. MediaWorks. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=47467

Kiss, Jemima (2005, December 22). Bloggers beat news sites for online authority.

.Liedtke, Michael (2006, January 20). Google Rebuffs Feds on Search Requests. Associated Press. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060120/ap_on_hi_te/google_records

McDonald, Joe (2006, January 6). Microsoft Shuts Down Chinese Blog. Associated Press. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060106/ap_on_hi_te/china_blog_shutdown

MacLeod, Hugh. Blog. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://gapingvoid.com/

P., M. Blog. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://newyorkhack.blogspot.com/

Rubel, Steve (2006, January 11). Where The Blog And Media Worlds Diverge. WebProNews. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/blogtalk/wpn-58-20060111WheretheBlogandMediaWorldsDiverge.html

Rubin, Daniel (2006, January 17). Happy Birthday, Blog Daddy. The Philadelphia Inquirer. Retrieved January 31, 2006 from http://blogs.philly.com/blinq/2006/01/ben_online.html