issues

This page looks at some blogging issues.

     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.

     a new journalism?

It's unsurprising that blogging has been acclaimed as the basis for a 'new journalism' - authors free to publishing for a discriminating audience (ideally larger than themselves and their dogs) without the "shackles of big media". One enthusiast claimed that

Blogging is a true democratizing agent. The promise of the Internet was that people would have a voice. This is one of the tools that's making it happen.

Examples are JD Lasica's quick Amateur and Professional Journalists: The Debate Rages On, Rob Walker's The News According to Blogs (here) and Mark Deuze's more nuanced 2001 paper Online Journalism: Modelling the First Generation of News Media on the World Wide Web.

Esther Dyson associate Kevin Werbach enthused that "the proliferation of content on the Web reduces the authority of traditional media brands and gatekeepers, who no longer have a lock on audience eyeballs".

Jon Katz was further over the top, with a FreedomForum rave about blogs occupying a unique space - they're

an example of the biological evolution of electronic communities — and of the astonishing ability of people online to create their own customized media.

That vision is reminiscent of Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community (Minerva: London 94). Wariness about atomisation of online microcommunities is evident in Cass Sunstein's Republic.com (Albany: State Uni of NY Press 01), Joseph Turow's Breaking Up America: Advertisers & the New Media World (Chicago: Chicago Uni Press 97) and other studies higlighted elsewhere on this site.

Dave Winer, whose involvement was noted on the preceding page, characterised critics of blogging as

professional, ink-stained journalists who are scared by what we're doing here. We cover technology better than they ever could.

The lack of professional ethics and quality control - there's much to be said for fact-checking and research - has however been criticised. One example is Rusty Foster's lament The utter failure of weblogs as journalism

We've explored the 'culture of celebrity' and ambivalence about privacy and online/offline 'tabloid journalism (people say they deplore invasive journalism and treasure their privacy but seem comfortable consuming trash tv and condoning invasions) in a separate profile.

     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.



::