Web logs

This page supports the DIY page in our Electronic Publishing guide. It discusses web logs (often referred to as blogs or bloggs and published by bloggers).

They're an illustration of claims that on the web every man (or dog) can be his own publisher ... and the corollary that being able to publish does not mean being able to write well or be readily found by readers at large.

     what's a blog?

Definitions of the blog, credit for the 'blog revolution' and identification of prototypes have provoked some of the silliest online disagreements (many of which have, of course, been conducted through blogs).

Some figures claim that they date from 1993 or 1994; others that they only appeared in 1999.

High profile US programmer Dave Winer says that a blog

is a personal Website. A Weblog allows you to easily publish a wide variety of content to the Web. You can publish written essays, annotated links, documents (Word, PDF and PowerPoint files), graphics, and multimedia.

and that they are

often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles. A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.

Cameron Barrett says that a blog is a "microportal"

typically ... a small web site, usually maintained by one person that is updated on a regular basis and has a high concentration of repeat visitors. Weblogs often are highly focused around a singular subject, an underlying theme or unifying concept.

Jon Katz more grandiloquently says that blogs

... described by one of their creators as the "pirate radio stations" of the Web, are a new, personal, and determinedly non-hostile evolution of the electric community. They are also the freshest example of how people use the Net to make their own, radically different new media.

WebReview caught Katz's utopian spin with a claim that, in response to commercialisation of the web, blogs are

taking back technology that promises to stir the sleeping giant. Soon, the soul of the Internet will sprout up through the cracks and ripen under the gaze of eager netizens, all in the form of a "blog."

The vagueness of the descriptions reflects the evolution of the genre, which arguably started during the early 1990s as 'filter' pages developed by HTML aficionados and came to embraced personal journals at the end of the decade when new software/services allowed authors to dispense with a knowledge of code.

Brigitte Eaton's argued - in our view convincingly - that the essential criteria are that the site consists of dated entries, doesn't necessarily appear on a regular basis and has a personal flavour, differentiating it from online abstracting services such as Arts & Letters Daily (ALD), the Washington Post Newsbytes service or Moreover.

From our perspective there are two basic styles of blog: the 'filter' and the 'journal'. Both usually have a reverse chronological structure, with the most recent content at the top of the page and the oldest at the bottom (or accessible through an 'archive' link).

     filters

Most early blogs were link-driven, pointing to other sites on a daily or weekly basis. The pointers were annotated to varying degrees: some were embedded in mini-essays; others with a commentary that didn't extend much beyond 'look at this'. Some were written with considerable verve. Others were marked by a self-consciously in-your-face or no-holds-barred tone - what an otherwise indulgent Wired article on Mr Winer characterised as "mouth off first, loudly, and often".

As a mechanism for selecting, evaluating and aggregating information across the web - 'filtering' or 'pre-surfing' - the significance of such blogs is largely dependent on the expertise (or entertainment value) of the authors.

Like traditional abstracting services they can be a superb way of identifying information that might be overlooked and placing it in context or looking under the hood. They also provide an opportunity for rolling updates of resources such as Charles Bailey's Bailey's online Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.

The downside is that much filtering is self-referential: bloggers pointing to other blogs or to information that's neither fresh nor assessed.

     journals

Rebecca Blood suggests that the "post-Blogger explosion" resulted in the emergence of the online short-form journal, ranging from terse aphorisms to lengthy meditations about poisoning pigeons in the park or deconstruction of The Sopranos.

The automated uploading and management of text through services such as Blogger meant that authors were able to "instantaneously update the page at their whim or impulse", with one promoter suggesting that

in a blog you can focus on a single topic, writing your thoughts on a daily basis, or write the daily occurrences of your life if you want. Some people also use blogs as a way of discussing their thoughts on many different topics.

In practice, since updating a blog is as easy as sending email, some groups in Japan, North America and Europe update several times a day.

Demographic information about blogging is problematical. Overall there appears to be a shift towards the youth market, from over 25's and thirty-somethings to teens (particularly female teens). Blogger claims to have around 250,000 'members'.

There have been suggestions that the revolution was short-lived, fading once authors found that they didn't have much to say, that their writing hadn't secured a major global/sectoral readership or that their peers were similarly disillusioned. Nothing like the online equivalent of a slide night with a boring accountant ... although fans of boring images can turn to the various webcam sites.

Teeth ezine’s Ben Brown sniffed that "Sorry, buddy - you’re just a dork who can’t come up with anything more than a paragraph or two to say every day. You’re not a designer, you’re not a writer, and you’re not an editor!" Zeldman's A List Apart groaned "not another weblog", a

genre of personal site which requires no effort to design or maintain and whose numbers, maybe for that very reason, are multiplying faster than rabbits on spanish fly. It's a genre of site which frequently creates no value whatsoever, yet demands to be taken seriously.

Some characteristic responses are here.

     Identification

One reason for the supposed decline of the genre is the difficulty of identifying blogs and their content.

Most search engines don't visit every site each day (the 'latency' for major engines ranges from three weeks to nine months), don't index each (or all of every) page and use different criteria for ranking search results. That means that few blogs are readily identifiable through traditional engines and portals.

Identification is accordingly often based on promotional activity by authors and links from other blog sites - the 'blogmedia community' is somewhat airless at times.

Blog-specific search engine or directory are also appearing. These include Blogfinder, Tpoowl and Blogs. The quality of citations on those engines is uneven.

MIT's Blogdex lists the most referred-to blogs, crawling the web to identify pointers and thus determine the most popular. (The project features an 'all-time' top links list', with plans for a search facility for bloggers needing to know "Am I hot, or am I not.")

Other pointers to blog statistics are here.

     Tools

As of October 2001 we'd counted over forty tools for blogging. Three of the most prominent are Blogger, Manila, LiveJournal and Weblogger. Other tools are listed here.

Blogger promotes its services as "Push Button Publishing for the People", predicting that "The Revolution Will Be Bloggerized". It offers free automated publishing, with text being posted to an existing site or a page that the developer will host at the subscription/advertising-based blog*spot. Authors typically use a Blogger template for layout of the site. Adding an entry involves entering the text onto a form at the Blogger site, which is then automatically uploaded. Manila is an initiative of the feisty Mr Winer. Weblogger offers free publishing tools and commercial hosting, as does LiveJournal.

For readers rather than authors Spyonit is a service offering an email alert when a specified blog is updated.

Hosting specialists include Blogger's Blog*spot, Diaryland, Winer's Userland, DiaryLand and Diarist.net (which boasts, perhaps not entirely tongue-in-cheek, that "You too can be an online exhibitionist").

     considerations

As we've suggested throughout this site, publishing online does not occur in a legal vacuum.

Defamation action about statements in blogs published by US authors is underway; internet service providers and content hosting providers have also featured in action over alleged defamation or trade practices offences. The boilerplate for most blog hosting services features restrictions on the inclusion of erotic or other adult content.

Another concern is the longevity of publication. Projects such as the Internet Archive that aim to capture a slice of the web have the potential to indefinitely preserve many blogs, with a red face or two a decade hence.



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