blogging

This page discusses types of blogs and tools for their production.

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 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 and there's now an AntiBloggies competition, whose organiser sniffs

One of the things I don't like is the blog where someone says something like, 'Today I had a cheese sandwich.' That's the kind of thing you see in most of these blogs. You know, fascinating. I don't give a flying ... whatever what you ate. Don't tell me you have a flat tire. And if this is how boring their writing is, I can't imagine how boring they must be to talk to in general.

There's an upbeat defence in Weblogging: Another kind of website by Chris Ashley in Berkeley Computing & Communications.Although blogging won't cure cancer or remove warts it will, aparently, teach introspection. Blog guru Rebecca Blood exulted that

I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important. This profound experience may be most purely realized in the blog-style weblog.

... The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions. Blogging every day, he will become a more confident writer. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world

     vlogs

And 2001 saw the emergence of the vog or vlog - the web-delivered video-blog, explained in one manifesto as "a vog is dziga vertov with a mac and a modem".

Vlogging is likely to become more popular as video editing software and camera prices decline, usability increases and artists emulate their peers ("i want my vogs to do with video what ee cummings does with words").

Vertov saw film, in the words of one critic, as "the technology that will provide the utopian inspiration and practical means for the arrival of socialism", with the theatre as "a place for collective and democratic consciousness and hence democratic representation". Problems with bandwidth, creativity and solipsism mean that that vlogging's unlikely to usher in a new millennium: most vlogs will be online versions of your neighbour's interminable travel slide show.

     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.

There's an introduction to Slash (as used in the collaborative blog Slashdot) in Running Weblogs with Slash (Sebastopol: O'Reilly 02) by David Krieger & Brian Aker.

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").

Those who prefer to consult text offline can explore The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice On Creating And Maintaining Your Blog (New York: Perseus 02) by Rebecca Blood - "Finally a book for anyone who has ever thought about starting a Weblog but wasn't sure what to post, how to post, or even where to go to register".







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