c
 



 


Blogs are 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.

Some have hailed blogging as a tool for deconstruction of the 'global information
hegemony', a means for personal liberation or the best thing since Gutenberg and the
emergence of 'knowledge management'.

US polemicist Hugh Hewitt's 


 





 
 
 (Nashville: Nelson 2004) bizarrely acclaimed them as important as
the printing press, another echo of Gilmore's whacky claim that the net was "the most
transforming technological event since the capture of fire".

Jeffrey Henning of online survey group Perseus Development characterised them as "a
social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults". Meredith Badger hailed
them as Y

the conjunctions of the Internet: the ands, the buts, the ors ± they add to online
conversations, refute them, or provide new perspectives altogether Y

and as "the homepage[s] that we wear".

Clifford Nass, co-author of  


  


 !


"# $ % 
 " &
(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1996) tartly
suggested that bloggers publish the personal details of their lives simply because they
want to think people are interested in them.

George Packer sniffed that Y

the constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves,
partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive ² that is, both pleasurable and
destructive: They're so easy to consume, and so endlessly available. Their secon d-by-
second proliferation means that far more is written than needs to be said about any one
thing. « Read them enough and any subject will go dead. Y




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

High profile US programmer and blog -service promoter Dave Winer says that a blogY

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. Y

and that they areY

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 yo u
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. Y

Sébastien Paquet argues that the distinguishing feature is Y

personal editorship - the content of the site is under the responsibility of a single per son
... and to some extent reflects this individual's personality Y

with a chronological structure, free access and archived content.

Rebecca Mead's 2000 #
% article 
!'

(

)
 *



)
 *
)  )
  
 + ) characterised blogging as Y

the CB radio of the Dave Eggers generation. And that is how, when Meg Hourihan
followed up her French-boyfriend-depression posting with a stream-of-consciousness
blog entry a few weeks later saying that she had developed a crush on someone but was
afraid to act on it - "Maybe I've become very good at eluding love but that's not a
complaint I just want to get it all out of my head and put it somewhere else", she wrote
- her love life became not just her business but the business of bloggers everywhere. Y

Some readers might respond 'get a life'; others would point to comments by media
theorist Theorist Jim Cross (discussed here) that Y

a webcam in your own home is a voluntary rendering public of what would normally be
private, a throwing open of your house to an indeterminately large and anonymous
public ... this needs to be seen in a communal context: this is not a case of one person
throwing their world open for public inspection but, rather, joining the ranks of people
who are making a relatively high profile appearance on the Web. How far this makes
them a member of a Web 'community' hinges to a large extent on what is understood by
that term. But I suspect the idea of 'sharing' is important in understanding what is going
on hereY

Cameron Barrett says that a blog is a "microportal" Y

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. Y

US ezine and blog-host ë
 claimed thatY

A blog, or weblog, is a personal Web site updated frequently with links, comm entary and
anything else you like. New items go on top and older items flow down the page. Blogs
can be political journals and/or personal diaries; they can focus on one narrow subject or
range across a universe of topics. The blog form is unique to the Web - and highly
addictive.Y

Scott Rosenberg's 1999 view was that blogsY

typically, are personal Web sites operated by individuals who compile chronological lists
of links to stuff that interests them, interspersed with information, editorializing and
personal asides. A good weblog is updated often, in a kind of real -time improvisation,
with pointers to interesting events, pages, stories and happenings elsewhere on the
Web. New stuff piles on top of the page; older stuff sinks to the bottom. Y

Jon Katz more grandiloquently says that blogsY

... 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.Y

*!  caught Katz's utopian spin with a claim that, in response to

commercialisation of the web, blogs are Y

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." Y

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 has 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 A 
"$

, ) and the 
 


 Newsbytes service (both alas defunct) or Moreover.

There is a broad, relentlessly upbeat introduction in !'


*


A 
 -    (New York: Perseus 2002) edited by Rebecca Blood. 

*
 -  *

(New York: Wiley 2002) edited by Paul Bausch, Matthew
Haughey & Meg Hourihan suggests that blogging is about 'community' -Y

the format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social
interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between
the myriad content produced for the Web Y

and thatY

Freed from the constraints of the printed page (or any concept of "page"), an author can
now blog a short thought that previously would have gone unwritten. The weblog's post
unit liberates the writer from word count. Y


 



  * &
A
A- 
 & 

(PDF) by Torrill
Mortensen & Jill Walker acclaims blogging as an aid for postgrads, applause echoed by
Sébastien Paquet's item 

 %
 *
  


  
 & .

Graham Leuschke's blog features a short and refreshingly irreverent list of what blogs
are not: stages, telephones, colour pages, salt, Icelandic signal fires, art or pirate radio -Y

Maybe they really are like porches ... - you can sit and rock by yourself all day, or every
once in a while the whole family will pile in with those jugs with "XXX" on them and
twangy old guitars and kids running around underfoot and cats scared out of their fur
and dogs baying in the yard and the joy that rises up in your heart like the bread in the
oven. Or maybe they're just things we do while we wait for something else to happen. Y




The history of blogging is now being commoditised by academia, with claims, counter -
claims and footnotes (complete with genuflections to St Jacques Derrida or Baudrillard)
about innovation and influence.
As we have suggested above, some figures claim that blogs date from 1993 or 1994;
others that they only appeared in 1999. Winer for example claims that Y

the first weblog was Tim Berners-Lee's "What's New?" page at http://info.cern.ch/,
which pointed to new Web sites as they came online. The second weblog wa s Marc
Andreessen's "What's New?" page at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (archived here), which performed a similar function until mid -1996 Y

with the term being coined by Jorn Barger in his Robot Wisdom blog.

They didn't take off or gain media coverage (which drove growth) until 1999, with the
advent of free and user-friendly blogging servi ces such as Blogger, Livejournal and Pitas.

The mix of publicity, services and emulation of peer groups supposedly saw the number
of blogs increase from around a thousand in mid -2000 to upwards of 500,000 in mid -
2002, according to Paquet.

The past year has seen the emergence of a range of 'premium' services such as
Inknoise.com ("personal web publishing for fanatics", apparently people who work in the
'creative industries' and read Abraham Maslow), which comments Y

The original blogs were all text, all the time. InkNoise moves boldly beyond text to give
people who want to express themselves with video, images, and sounds access to the
powerful publishing structure of the chronological blog.

These new media types deserve more varied and more highly stylized surroundings,
which are provided by InkNoise weblog and gallery templates. Y

We have explored how blogging has been received by the media and academia here.Y

 c




There are few credible estimates about the number of online blogs (one enthusiast
tracks offline - ie dead - blogs here) or their growth. Many figures are contradictory or
merely self-serving.

 #
noted claims that in January 2002 alone some 41,000 people created new
blogs using Blogger and that there were then more than 500,000. In August 2002
another source claimed that Blogger had 350,000 users, with converts supposedly
"creating a new weblog every 40 seconds, or more than 60,000 a month". By early 2006
that had risen to around 160,000 per month (albeit with many splogs), subsequently
declining to 100,000 per month.

In September 2002 the #
% 

reported that LiveJournal had signed up
690,000 users since 1998 and was currently gaining another 1,100 b loggers per day. It
is unclear whether all 690,000 were (and still are) maintaining their personal pages and,
if so, how frequently.

In the same month the  

claimed that Brazil was the "second-largest Blogger-using
country" after the US, with up to 13% of the 750,000 Blogger users.

In June 2003 Blogcount estimated that there were between 2.4 million to 2.9 milli on
active blogs. As a point of reference that is around 10% of the number of dot -com
registrations (although most blogs do not have unique domain names). Blogcount
attributed over 1.6 million active users to the three largest centrally hosted services.

PointBlog.com noted in June 2003 that a WHOIS registry database search identified over
10,000 'com', 'org', 'net', info', 'biz' and 'us' domains with "blog" in the name.

The US National Institute for Technology & Liberal Education (NITL) BlogCensus at that
time identified 655,63 1 'blogs', with a substantial margin of error and a note that around
30% were 'inactive'. An October 2003 report by Perseus Development on 
 
&*  claimed that Y

Based on the rapid growth rate demonstrated by the leading services, Perseus expects
the number of hosted blogs created to exceed five million by the end of 2003 and to
exceed ten million by the end of 2004. Y

For us that is an echo of mid-1990s claims that by 2005 the number of web sites would
outnumber the human population, a warning about projections from an initial "rapid
growth rate".

Based on its survey of 3,634 blogs on eight blog hosting services (Blog -City, BlogSpot,
Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePage, Weblogger and Xanga) Perseus claimed that as
of October 2003 there were about 4.12 million blogs.

In May 2004 Technorati claimed to track 2.4 million blogs, increasing to 11.7 million
blogs in Jube 2005. The Technorati figure was assailed as simply a count of blogs
registered: it did not identify blogs in regular use and did not differentiate between
genuine blogs and splogs (aka spam blogs).

Undeterred, Technorati noted claims by ad group Universal McCann in March 2008 that
184 million people "have started a blog " (alas, no figures on how many have stopped
maintaining a blog) and that 346 million people read blogs in 2007. comScore
MediaMetrix claimed in mid-2008 that there were 77.7 million blog readers in the US.
eMarketer (drew on other figures to suggest that there were 94.1 million US readers. A
million here, a million there ... it all adds up (or doesn't).i 

  exulted that "nine blogs are created every minute and 2.3 content updates are
posted every second". Those seeking perspective might ask how many disappear every
minute and note other 'magical' statistics, eg globally there is a suicide every 40
seconds. In November 2004 PubSub claimed to track 6.4 million blogs.

In January 2005 the blogosphere was abuzz with claims that around 25% of all South
Koreans have a blog, some US pundits lamenting a 'blog gap'. That supposedly included
90% of those in their 20s and 79% of those under 40. In fact, the figures are for basic
homepages - often little more than an email address - with the nation's service
providers, rather than blogs.

In July 2006 the Pew Internet & American Life Project estimated that the US "blog
population has grown to about 12 million American adults", some 8% of US adult
internet users. The number of US blog readers was estimated as 57 million adults (39%
of the US online population), although few of those people read widely or read often.
David Sifry reported in April 2007 that growth in the number of blogs created had slowed
- "matured" - with other observers noting that the percentage of active blogs are
compared to the total number of blogs tracked by Technorati was declining, down from
36.71% in May 2006 to 20.93% in March 2007.

 

Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to
80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe)
and that few are regularly updated.

The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page
commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.

The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been
updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either
permanently or temporarily abandoned".

Jeffrey Henning of Perseus sniffed that Y

Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many
tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million
blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. Y

Perseus claimed that the average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned
blogs was 126 days, with some 132,000 blogs being abandoned after a year or more.
The oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days.

In January 2009 the Pew Internet Project, in one of its more problematical estimates,
claimed that 11% of online US adults used Twitter or a similar microblogging service as
of December 2008, up from 9% in November 2008 and 6% in May 2008. The
overreporting appears to reflect conflation of microblogging and social network service
(eg Facebook) activity.

 

Perseus's 2003 
 &*  report commentedY

When you say "blog" most people think of the most popular weblogs, which are often
updated multiple times a day and which by definition have tens of thousands of daily
readers. These make up the tip of a very deep iceberg: prominently visible, but not
characteristic of the iceberg as a whole.

What is below the water line are the literally millions of blogs that are rarely pointed to
by others, since they are only of interest to the family, friends, fellow students and co -
workers of their teenage and 20-something bloggers. Think of them as blogs for
nanoaudiences.

Nanoaudiences are the logical outcome of continued growth in blogs. Assume for a
moment that one day 100 million people regularly read blogs and that they each read 50
other peoples' blogs. That translates into 5 billion subscriptions (50 X 100 million). Now
assume on that same day there are 20 million active bloggers. That translates into 250
readers per blog (5 billion / 20 million) - far smaller audiences than any traditional one-
to-many communication method. And this is just an average; in practice many blogs
have no more than two dozen readers. Y

Gawker executive Nick Denton commented in 2004 that Y

Everyone has this illusion that Web logs have taken the world by storm, but Web logs
have probably only reached 10 percent of the Internet population. Our goal is to reach
the remainder.Y

Uh huh. A September 2004 survey by advertising giant DDB found that much of th e UK
had not written, read or even heard of a blog.
That led Lester Haines in 
 to comment that Y

There is some very refreshing news today for those who live outside the rarified
atmosphere of the internet world, and indeed for many of us struggling for breath within
it - most people don't have a bloody clue what net buzzwords mean but can evidently
function perfectly well in society despite this handicap. Indeed, a survey of taxi drivers,
pub landlords and hairdressers ("often seen as barometers of popular trends" according
to Reuters, though God alone knows when hairdressers became barometers of
anything), by ad outfit DDB London showed that 90 per cent of barometers have not the
foggiest idea what a podcast is, and an impressive 70 per cent liv e in blissful ignorance
of blogging. ...

A shaken DDB London planning director, Sarah Carter, admitted: "Our research not only
shows that there is no buzz about blogging and podcasting outside of our media industry
bubble, but also that people have no und erstanding of what the words mean. It's a real
wake-up call."Y

The UK figure is consistent with independent surveys. The June 2005 Pew Internet &
American Life study reported that "the average American Internet user is not sure what
podcasting is or what an RSS feed does". As late as January 2004 Pew found that 68%
of online people in the US supposedly did not know what a blog was.

In April 2006 the British Market Research Bureau's quarterly survey claimed that 70% of
respondents had heard of blogging but t hat only 2% of UK internet users publish blogs
and 10% view a weblog once a month or more.

Two months later a separate survey, by newspaper publishers Metro and Telegraph
Media, claimed that only 13% of those surveyed in the UK had read an individual's bl og
in the preceding week, compared with 40% in the US, 25% in France and 12% in
Denmark. 12% of UK readers had read a newspaper blog in that week, compared with
24% in the US, 10% in France and 9% in Denmark. 95% of those surveyed in the US
said they had used a website for news in the past week, compared with 89% in Britain,
81% in France and 78% in Denmark.

Blog narcissism was evident in the lowest levels of response - those from people who
had had a personal blog - 3% in Britain and Denmark, 7% in the US and 8% in France.


  

Estimates of the demographics vary.

In July 2003 BlogCensus suggested that there were 701,150 "sites we think are
weblogs", of which 380,657 appeared to be in English. It claimed that Portuguese, (with
54,496 blogs), Polish (42,677) and Farsi (27,002) were the next most popular languages
- well ahead of French (a mere 10,381) and German (7,736). On a per capita basis the
language with highest blog penetration appeared to be Icelandic, with 3,542 blogs.

In July 2006 Médiamétrie, dismissing claims that 10% of French population "have blogs",
claimed that there were just over three million active French blogs. UK market
researcher Synovate claimed in June 2007 that only 10% of British 18 to 24 -year-olds
have ever blogged.

'Language Networks on LiveJournal', a 2007 paper by Susan Herring, John Paolillo et al

in G A   
 
 &
ë)
ë& &
examined language
use in 1,000 randomly-selected and 5,025 crawled LiveJournals to determine the overall
language demographics and the robustness of four non -English language networks on
LiveJournal.com. The findings indicate that English dominates globally but not loc ally,
network robustness is determined mostly by population size, and journals that bridge
between languages are written by multicultural, multilingual individuals, or else they
have broadly accessible content.

The metrics enthusiasts at Jupiter Research claim that 57% of bloggers have a
household income of under US$60,000 per year, a figure that is presumably consistent
with concentration of blogging under Anglo college students.

Jupiter's examination of the entrails - eye of newt, ear of bat - resulted in claims that
there is no gender divide in the blogosphere, that around 73% of bloggers have been
online for 5 years and that "only 4% of the online community read them", presumably a
disappointment for the industrious scribes of Reykjavik.

If Jupiter's figures are to believed, blogs are primarily be read by men (60% vs 40%
women) and in households where the total income is over US$60,000 per year (61%,
the difference from authorship figures reflecting doting mums and dads?).

Perseus' 
 &*   commented thatY

Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it
twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be
written very informally (often in "unicase": long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS
used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging
conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). ...

Teenagers have created the majority of blogs. Blogs are currently the province of the
young, with 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30. Half of bloggers are
between the ages of 13 and 19. Following this age group, 39.6% of bloggers are
between the ages of 20 and 29. Y

It suggests that males were more likely than females to abandon blogs, with 46.4% of
abandoned blogs created by males (versus 40.7% of active blogs created by males).

Abandonment rates did not vary based on age. Those who abandoned blogs supposedly
tended to write posts that were only 58% as long as those bloggers who continued to
publish, "which simply indicates that those who enjoy writing stick with blogs longer".

Leigh Philips sniffed in 2003 that blogging Y

remains the dominion of geeks, wittier-than-thou twenty-to-thirtysomethings in

Manhattan and angry gay Republicans. Y

By February 2005 Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project was claiming
that eight million US adults had created a blog, with supposedly 10% to 20% of US blogs
being "related to religion". So much for angry digital log cabin boys. Médiamétrie claimed
that 80% of French bloggers were 24 or younger; over 50% were female.

The 2004 paper 
  $

,
&
!

 &

*

by
Susan Herring, Lois Ann Scheidt and co -authors argues that apparent gender/age bias in
media and academic coverage of blogs arisesY

in part as a result of focus on a particular blog type, the so -called 'filter' blog, which is
produced mostly by adult males. We argue that by privileging filter blogs and thereby
implicitly evaluating the activities of adult males as more interesting, important and/or
newsworthy than those of other blog authors, public discourses about weblogs: 1)
marginalize the activities of women and teen bloggers, 2) misrepresent the fundamental
nature of the weblog pheno menon, and 3) indirectly reproduce societal sexism and
ageism. Y

The bias might, of course, also reflect the vapidity of much teen blogging.

The 2004 view is consistent with that of Dustin Harp & Mark Tremayne's 2006 'The
Gendered Blogo sphere: Examining Inequality Using Network and Feminist Theory' in
Œ
 
"


 &
.  ), Sarah Pedersen's 'Women users

motivations for establishing and interacting with blogs (web logs)' in 3  
 
Œ
  


% 2, Scott Nowson & Jon Oberl ander's  )



-

  

 *

(PDF), &

A' 

 
(PDF) by Jonathan Schler, Moshe Koppel, Shlomo Argamon & James Pennebaker, ' 
 

 &

*
A

(PDF) by Xiang Yan and Susan Herring & John Paolillo's
2006 'Gender and Genre Variation in Weblogs' in 10 Œ
  
ë
&

 &
4.

Sarah Pedersen & Caroline Macafee's article 'Gender Differences in British Blogging' in 12
Œ
  

 + 
 &
 4 (2007) draws on a 48 person [!] sample
in concluding that "men and women find the same range of satisfactions in blogging.
However, more women use blogging as an outlet for creative work, whether as a hobby
or as a livelihood".



 

Blogging has attracted true believers and businesses that have a vested interest in
boosting blogs as a cure for various social ills, a mechanism for personal growth, a way
of making money or merely something for journalists to wri te about. Suggestions that
many people abandon blogging altogether after a handful of posts, post sporadically or
simply never blog thus have attracted vehement criticism.

There has been little research into why people don't blog and into suggestions that many
people under 25 blogged once or twice before moving on to other social media because
blogging - to use the words of one 19 year old contact - was "so, so yesterday and all
my friends are on Facebook" and because the blogosphere has been polluted by
sploggers.

The blog ph enomenon in the English-speaking world has peaked and - as forecast in an
earlier version of this page - most blogs are being stored in the part of cyberspace
dedicated to hula hoops, pogo sticks and other fashions that reached their use -by date.

That does not mean people will stop blogging altogether. Novices will try blogging
(particularly as a rite of passage); some will post passionately and regularly rather than
"getting over it, just like zits" and other teenage disorders. Blogging is not going to
disappear. Entrepreneurs will still be able to make money guiding CEOs or celebrities or
knowledge managers in best-practice blogging at an individual or corporate level. Some
people will continue to find fulfilment through blogs that reach an audience of o ne or an
audience of one million.

We should however be realistic: the 'blogging revolution' collided with human nature and
human nature won. Most people do not like writing, even if they have something to write
about. Many people do not have time to blog on an ongoing basis in a way that attracts
a substantial audience. Some people will continue to write offline diaries, commonplace
books and criticism - including work that relies on a pen or pencil rather than a
keyboard. Others will flow with the latest fad.

Robert Scoble thus sniffed in 2007 that Y

there's a bigger trend I'm seeing: people who used to enjoy blogging their lives are now
moving to Twitter. Andrew Parker punctuates that trend with a post "Twitter is ruining
my blogging". I find that to be the case too and when I talked about this on Twitter a
raft of people chimed in and agreed that they are blogging a lot less now that Twitter is
here.Y

Ôc !"


 


Enthusiasts for blogging, in particular some of the self -described blog evangelists, have
echoed past rhetoric about the net as an "online community" of "netizens" - Y

To be on the Net is to be part of a global community. Netizens are ... people who
understand that it takes effort and action on each and everyone's part to make the Net a
regenerative and vibrant community and resource.Y

Blogging has thus been characterised as Y

a new, personal, and determinedly non-hostile evolution of the electric community. Y

Those who write, read and comment on blogs have been tagged "the blogosphere", a
community that supposedly features a distinct "blogger ethic".

In practice it is debatable whether the 'blogosphere' is a usable concept other than as an

indicator of hipness in media reports and as a device for promoting primers or
appearances by digerati on the lecture circuit. Would one talk about a community of
diary writers, newspaper readers, television viewers or journalists?

In discussing rhetoric about 'online community' we have noted Jonathan Zittrain's acute
comment thatY

"online community" joins "sysop" in the oversize dustbin of trite or hopelessly esoteric,
hence generally meaningless, cyberspace vernacular ... it represents something once
craved and still invoked (if only as a linguistic placeholder) even as it is believed by all
but the most naïve to be laughably beyond reach. Since it's applied to almost anything,
it now means vague warm fuzzies and nothing more. Y


  

'Blog evangelist' Rebecca Blood argues that "weblogs aren't just glorified pages of links
and rambling personal sites; they are an antidote to mass media" and "are also bringing
creative expression to everyday people when they need it most".

In a nice spin on the 'Hacker Ethic' - discussed here - she claims that there is a Blogger
Ethic, "fostering real connections based on trust, respect, and creativity". Y

A Weblog is based entirely on trust. People come because they like to read what you
write. If you suddenly began promoting Nokia cell phones on the side, news of it would
come out quickly because this is a close-knit community. And that would be a
tremendous breach of trust. It would be a scandal in the Weblog community because it
goes against our entire ethic. Y

Supposedly "bloggers don't need to write a novel - or even a complete sentence - to get
their point across to a mass audience", the residents of "blogistan" or the "blogosphere".
Insightful US lawyer Martin Schwimmer more tartly observed that "In the future,
everyone will be famous to 15 people". Others have quipped that some will be infamous
to everyone in the blog echo-chamber, with advertising guru Neil French, resigning from
WPP amid claims of "death by blog" after furore over his comments about women in
advertising.

Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal argues that online journals are better than email, which
places a 'burden' on the author's friends to provide some responses -Y

With email, even if you say 'Don't Reply' you are kind of expecting them to read it. A
journal makes no such demands because 'you're telling everyone' rather than anyone in
particular.Y

Some people (and robots) do provide responses: Gilad Mishne & Natalie Glance's 2006
$! )AA )


*


(PDF) on the basis of a sample of 500
posts claims that the average blog comment is 63 words long.

Paquet claims that "the millions of links present in weblogs form a giant, visible web of
affinity" and that "a philosophy of sharing generally prevails in the weblog community",
although we suspect the same could be said for the 'community' of newspaper readers or
television watchers.

Warblogging - from the same school as warchalking and wardriving - offers an

opportunity for the politically engaged to vent their spleen, articulate a cause or foster a
community network. At best such blogs have the bite and relevance of a Karl Kraus or
an IF Stone. At worst they have the subtlety of a drive-by shooting.

James Crabtree comments that Y

Blogs Are Like Cocaine - Cocaine makes its users feel overwhelmingly popular, and they
get very aggressive about their opinions. It is also addictive. Blogs often have the same
effect. Because bloggers are at the centre of their own personal world of communication,
it can feel like a rush, and can lead bloggers to be opinionated and extreme. Y



#
 

Crabtree had earlier explained that Y

Blogs Are Like An Episode Of Lassie - In an episode of Lassie, the dog always trys to tell
people something important. Because Lassie can't speak, being a dog, someone has to
interpret what she is saying: "What's that lassie? There are some children stuck in the
old mine?" The same is true with a network of Blogs. Because the "blogosphere" has no
centre, and no official leaders, it is very difficult for it to express a collective opinion.

For politicians this means becoming able to sense what people are saying online.
Concepts of "emergent democracy" as promoted by Joi Ito require institutions and
politicians that can act as weather veins for which direction the broad mass of blogging
opinion is heading in . But politicians should also recognise that the blogosphere never
has a single coherent view, or collective will ± it is not a system for formal
representation.Y

Suggesting in !

 #

 that many blogs are "meta-comment
by bright young men who never leave their rooms", George Packer commented that Y
Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic
sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated
hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a
chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication.
There's a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and
someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere ² every point,
rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or "fisk" (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical
reading) ² is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that
bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. Y

Danah Boyd commented that Y

The tendency of bloggers to talk about blogging is often criticized, yet this practice of
self-reflection is precisely what makes blogging a valuable contribution to public
discourse. Bloggers are highly critical, questioning creatures. Whatever their subject,
they document their observations and examine them inquisitively. Y

Some unkinder critics have dismissed such assertions as problematical or suggested that
the process is akin to an examination of navel lint by other "highly critical, qu estioning
creatures" (albeit in padded rooms of the non -digital variety). Aaron Barlow's 
 
A &#* &ë  (Westport: Praeger 2008) was greeted with assertions
that blogs are Y

transforming our cultural landscape, creating, as his title suggests, a new public sphere.
For those concerned about the future of democracy, the existence of such a civic space
may be our last bulwark against neo-liberalism "disappearing" open discussion. Y

Graham Lampa's 2004   


 A
& 

 

 )

*
  noted that Y

For those making a case for the blogosphere as a community, the results of the Perseus
study are anything but encouraging. How can a community be said to exist among
individuals, the vast majority of whom have never met one another and do not
communicate with one another? The easy answer is to declare that the blogging
community does not exist, that the blogosphere is not a cohesive group of people who
share common goals and values. This answer, however, does not account for the
widespread notion of the transnational blogging community or for the persistence of the
blogger identity. A clearer answer to the community conundrum lies somewhere between
the hype of a new and revolutionary online community and the sobering statistical reality
of the Perseus study. In the absence of strong interpersonal links among members of the
blogosphere, an alternative explanation for the persistence of community is needed. At
the core of the blogosphere lies a minority of active and engaged bloggers who post,
comment, and link frequently, creating a kernel of conversational community based on
personal networks facilitated by blogging tools and associated technologies. However, for
the vast majority of users who blog casually, infrequently, and for the benefit of their
real-world friends and family, the blogosphere does not exist in the ethereal, hyperlinked
connections that bind blogs to one another; rather, it resides in the mind of the
individual blogger as an online imagined community resulting from the shared
experience of instant publishing. Y

It is unclear whether such a community is any more meaningful than the 'community' of
those with a shared experience of watching television or reading offline text. Digerati
and desperates aside, how many bloggers indeed characterise themselves as part of an
"online imagined community" comprising those who have merely placed a few words
online?
Other perspectives are provided in works such as 'A Bosom Buddy Afar Brings a Distant
Land Near: Are Bloggers a Global Community?' by Norman Su, Yang Wang, Gloria Mark,
Tosin Aiyelokun & Tadashi Nakano in 
  
&

 
/

& 


ë&

  
&

 

 &  
/
(Springer 2005)
edited by Peter van den Besselaar & Giorgio de Michelis.


 $

As the following pages note, blogging has been acclaimed as the latest "new journalism"
and as a mechanism for democratising the media or merely making reporters/proprietors
more responsive to the "community".

Some of the more fervent true believers have even characterised the blogosphere as an
"online truth squad", although in practice community involvement in life among settlers
on the digital frontier often seems to be a matter of indifference or a wild west lynch
mob.

Danny Schechter of MediaChannel.org commented to the # 

in 2006 that
although active participation by media consumers was healthy for democracy and
journalism, partisanship was sometimes masked as media criticism -Y

It's now O.K. to demonize the messenger. This has led to a very uncivil discourse in
which it seems to be O.K. to shout down, discredit, delegitimize and denigrate the
people who are reporting stories and to pick at their methodology and ascribe motives to
them that are often unfair.Y

Others have suggested that exhaustive dissection of journalists may be fundamentally

unfair Y

blogs have a longer shelf life than most traditional news media articles. A newspaper
reporter's original article is likely to disappear from the free Web site after a few days
and become inaccessible unless purchased from the newspaper's archives, while the
blogger's version of events remains available forever. Y

AA )
,! 

 %
&

)
 -   )
 
 
   '
!  - '

(Nashville York: Nelson 2006) by Glenn
Reynolds mixes triumphalism about 'the little guys' with zaniness about colonisation of
outer space Y

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when large companies and powerful
governments reigned supreme over the little guy. But new technologies are empowering
individuals like never before, and the Davids of the world - the amateur journalists,
musicians, and small businessmen and women - are suddenly making a huge economic
and social impact. Y

Populism is alive and well in the blogosphere.

Lovink's ±



   &     (London: Routledge
2007) "upgrades worn-out concepts", claiming to develop "a general theory of blogging",
with blogs embodying an "incommunicado agenda" and a Y

nihilist impulse to empty out established meaning structures. Blogs bring on decay of the
20th century broadcast media, and are proud of their in -crowd aspect in which linking,
tagging and ranking have become the main drivers. Y
Alas, not much there about self-indulgence and obscurantism. 'Ethics in Blogging' ( PDF)
by Andy Koh, Alvin Lim, Ng Ee Soon, Benjamin Detenber & Mark Cenite and 'C.O.B.E: A
proposed code of blogging ethics' ( here) by Martin Kuhn look on the bright side. Other
codes include those of -Y

Y Cyberjournalist.net | hereY

Y Rebecca Blood | hereY

Blog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis fashionably dismissed hype about the "blogging
revolution" by commentingY

The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and
people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe. They want to believe there's
going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed. Y

JOURNALISM

%
 

It is 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 thus claimed that Y

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. Y

  magazine desperately anointed bloggers in 2006 Y

for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital
democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game Y

Other examples are JD Lasica's quick A 


 Œ
 

,*

-, Rob Walker's #
A&&
 


(here), John Hiler's 2002



    &

)
 article, Mark Deuze's more nuanced 2001
paper - Œ
 

 0
' 

#
 


 * and papers in 
    1
 0 
  (New York:
Routledge 2006) edited by Mark Tremayne.

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".

Andrew Sullivan similarly praised the 'blogging revolution' Y

Blogging is changing the media world and could, I think, foment a revolution in how
journalism functions in our culture' ...[it might represent] a publishing revolution more
profound than anything since the printing press Y

John Ellis, interviewing his own keyboard in the April 2002 0


) burbled that
blogs free the pundits from old media. Those pundits - presumably including himself -
areY
providing the most energetic, lively, and passionate analysis, commentary, and opinion
around ...

Bloggers are not devoted to keeping you on their page. Their purpose is to take you to
other places. They figure that if they do that well enough, you'll return to the peer group
that they host.

What further distinguishes bloggers is their understanding of the peer communities that
they serve. For one thing, bloggers assume that their readers are as smart as they are,
if not smarter. What a refreshing notion! When they're not focused on themselves,
mainstream journalists spend most of their time sucking up to sources and writing with a
keen eye toward source protection. Bloggers spend most of their time engaged in
constant communication with their readers. Y

Jon Katz was further over the top, with a FreedomForum rave about blogs occupying a
unique space. They are Y

an example of the biological evolution of electronic communities ² and of the

astonishing ability of people online to create their own customized media. Y

That vision is reminiscent of Howard Rheingold's 2  
 ) (Minerva:

London 1994) and ë 
*
#3ë
&  !

 (New York: Perseus 2002).

Dan Gillmor's  ' 


Œ
 
*)
  

 
(Sebastopol: O'Reilly 2004) claimed that Y

Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it
from a lecture to a conversation Y

Madanmohan Rao merely claimed that Y

In the 21st century, every business is a publisher, every Internet or mobile user is a
reporter, and every citizen is an editor.Y

Wariness about atomisation of online microcommunities is evident in Cass Sunstein's

* &4&
 (Albany: State Uni of NY Press 2001), Markus Prior's 

+
&

,
& &)
 
&& 

 ) 
 & !
!

 1
 &

(Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2007), Joseph Turow's  % 
A &A! 

"# 
 (Chicago: Chicago Uni Press 1997), other
studies highlighted elsewhere on this si te and some items noted on the
Cyberjournalist.net *

(


*
 
5
 
6 page.

There is a more splenetic response in Michael Keren's 


 #
 & 
A  (Lanham: Lexington 2006), a work that provoked emo among the 'pyjamahadeen'
over hyperbole that bloggers are "lonely and isolated". #
 
 %&

 ë/G+
 #
)&  (London: Continuum 2008) by Howard
Rosenberg & Charles Feldman lamented thatY

citizen journalists [are] ordained as democratising saviors, liberating society from the
tyranny of competence and expertise.Y

Arianna Huffington, belatedly sniffing the zeitgeist in April 2004, penned a "mash note to
the blogosphere", announcing that Y
Simply put, blogs are the greatest breakthrough in popular journalism since Tom Paine
broke onto the scene «

When bloggers decide that something matters, they chomp down hard and refuse to let
go. They're the true pit bulls of reporting. The only way to get them off a story is to cut
off their heads (and even then you'll need to pry their jaws open). They almost all work
alone, but, ironically, it's their collective effort that makes them so effective. They share
their work freely, feed off one another's work, argue with each other, and add to the
story dialectically.Y

George Packer disagreed in !

 #

 , claiming that blogs are Y

atomized, fragmentary, and of the instant. They lack the continuity, reach, and depth to
turn an election into a story. « this particular branch of the Fourth Estate just doesn't
lend itself to sustained narrative and analysis. Blogs remain private, written in the
language and tone of knowingness, insider shorthand, instant mastery. Read them
enough and any subject will go dead. Y

Oliver Kamm also dissented from Huffington's hype, noting Y

In practice, while the medium of delivery has changed, the content of newspapers
remains the same. The online and print editions of this newspaper are almost identical.
Internet evangelists believed electronic newspapers would be storehouses of
information; in fact most people want not more information but more ef ficient ways of
organising the information they are given.

What blogs do effectively is provide a vehicle for instant comment and opinion. ... They
are not a new form of journalism, but new packaging for a venerable part of a
newspaper. Even the best blogs are parasitic on what their practitioners contemptuously
call the "mainstream media". Without a story to comment on or an editorial to rubbish,
they would have nothing to say.

Most blogs have nothing to say even then. Without editorial control, they are
unconstrained by sense, proportion or grammar. Almost by definition, they are the
preserve of those with time on their hands. Blogs have a few successes in harrying
miscreant politicians or newspapers, but they are a vehicle for perpetuating myths as
much as correcting them.Y

Silicon Valley pundit Dan Gillmor claimed in 2002 that the blog is becoming the
"standard news medium", as the world moves from "old Media, through New Media, to
We Media" - "using the power and the knowledge and the energy of people at the
edges".

William Powers quipped that "Allegiance to individual media outlets has become an
eccentric affectation, like wearing a bow tie". It is unclear, however, whether most blog
readers (and writers) are more eclectic. As Sunstein notes in )ë
&  
#,


(Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2003) a mass media provides opportunities for
expression of and exposure to differing views; that's in contrast to the conformity of
much blogging.

Mark Cuban, conflating ubiquity with quality, acclaimed bloggers as the "new paparazzi"
-Y

outside those gates, knocking on the door, trying to be he ard for the past 100 or more
years have been wanna be Woodward and Bernsteins. People with information, ideas
and concepts that they know the populace would respond to have been turned away,
again and again.

Its payback time. The bloggers are here, and they are ready to knock down the gates
and get their pound of flesh. The traditional media has no idea what is about to hit them.

In every major conference, at every major speech, sitting at tables in restaurants, there
is going to be a blogger or podcaste r with microphone, PDA, Videophone, laptop or paper
and pencil in hand. Listening. Taking notes. That information is going to be transmitted
to and from a blog entry and placed in the hands of "the readers".

Unlike celebrities who hear or see the flash of the camera, the gatekeepers don't know
they are there. Blogging in plain site. Questioning everything. Y

Some might think that the old paparazzi were bad enough ... and that there will be more
echoing than questioning or checking. Franklin Foer commented that the "derisive
attitude" towards "old media"Y

resembles nothing more than the New Left, which charged journalism with dulling the
sense and sensibility of the masses, preventing them from seeing the ho rrors of the
capitalist order.Y

  &
'&

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

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

In contrast, Gawker proprietor Nick Denton dismissed hype about 'the blog revolution '
by sayingY

Give me a break. The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing
professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe ... They
want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be
changed. Y

Journalist Eric Engberg commented after the 2004 US presidential election that Y

The public is now assaulted by news and pretend-news from many directions, thanks to
the now infamous "information superhighway." But the ability to transmit words, we
learned during the Citizens Band radio fad of the 70's, does not mean that any
knowledge is being passed along. One of the verdicts rendered by election night 2004 is
that, given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility, the chances of the
bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing
the dog it fastens on. Y

Tina Brown spoke of "Big Journalism's realization that it has lost control" Y

Mainstream Media are trapped in the pincer assaults of the fact-free ethical anarchy of
the blogosphere and the cynicism of quarterly profit-driven conglomerates enslaved to
entertainment values.Y

Sydney Schanberg commented that Y

Chattering oracles are telling us that newspapers will die soon, as the Internet takes
over. But the puzzlement is, where will the new digital providers of information get their
fresh news? serious journalism is labor-intensive and time-consuming and therefore
requires large amounts of money and health benefits and pensions. The blogosphere has
plenty of time, but as yet none of the oth er items. So if and when newspapers fade into
darkness, as the all-seeing oracles foretell, what will happen? Perhaps, in a future time
of airborne pigs, altruism will suddenly infuse our culture, and money will descend, like
manna, on the Internet to pay for the reporters to do the intensive journalism needed as
a check on abusive power. And if altruism or labor-friendly corporate ideologies don't
magically appear? The oracles are mostly silent on that eventuality.Y

Jody Raynsford's 2003 
 5
 

 suggested that blogs Y

are opinionated, ranting, often incoherent and frequently biased with little regard for
accuracy or balance. They are also compellingly addictive and threatening to emerge as
a new brand of journalism. ...

Perhaps one attraction of blogging lies in its unme diated and dynamic quality. Without
an agenda, editorial stance or pedantic sub-editor standing between the writer and
reader, blogging can provide reportage in a raw and exciting form. Y

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


5
 
.

Brendan O'Neill commented that Y

there is more to journalism than instant reaction and response. Good journalism involves
rising above your immediate concerns, weighing up the facts, and attempting to say
something more measured and insightful - sometimes even truthful and profound.
Blogging creates a white noise of personal prejudice, akin to students arguing in a bar
rather than experts saying anything striking. I haven't got a problem with pub -style
debates about the issues of the day - but journalism it isn't. Y

and naughtily asked Y

is the 'blogosphere' making the crusty publishers of yesteryear obsolete? Is the spread
of personal websites on a par with the birth of print? Not quite. Blogging may be fun -
which is why I've been publishing one at www.brendanoneill.net for the past six months;
it may even be a new and exciting way of using the web. But it's not journalism, and it
ain't no revolution.

For all the claims that the 'big bloggers' are challenging the traditionalists, in fact many
blogs simply leech off the old-style media. The political and comment blogs that are seen
as being at the forefront of the 'blogging revolution' oft en do little more than write about
and react to articles published in traditional media outlets (or 'the Big Media' as they call
it), rather than generating new journalistic content. Y

Steven Levy offered a more upbeat comment in #

% during March 2003,
suggesting Y

Perhaps it was inevitable that this war would become the breakthrough for blogs. The
bigmouths of the so-called Blogosphere have long contended that the form deserves to
be seen as a significant component of 21st-century media. And in the months preceding
the invasion, blogging about the impending conflict had been feisty and furious. But it
wasn't until the bombs hit Baghdad that Weblogs finally found their moment. The arrival
of war, and the frustratingly variegated nature of this particular conflict, called for two
things: an easy-to-parse overview for news junkies who wanted information from all
sides, and a personal insight that bypassed the sanitizing Cuisinart of big -media news
editing. Y

We have explored the 'culture of celebrity' and ambiv alence 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.

Perry de Havilland, considering hype about blogs, democracy and the media in 2003,
commented thatY

Well, I would answer that blogs are evol ution±izing journalism, not revolutionising it:
Brendan O'Neill is no less of a journalist for being a blogger and neither is Stephen
Pollard, who also blogs. The dead tree publications for which they write are neither
harmed nor helped overall ... blogs push a great deal of traffic towards their websites,
but are in direct competition with the part of a newspaper or broadcaster which
editorialises. However blogs do not have reporters in Afghanistan or Liberia: blogs are
mostly about punditry rather than reporting. So a journalist's ability to write an article
for a newspaper is much as it was, but his ability to act as a credible independent
µcommentator¶ is enhanced by his blog articles, many of which might be overly
opinionated for a newspaper editor mindful of his shareholders or ministerial chums ...

And far from blogs 'enhancing democracy', which is just another way of saying
enhancing 'politics', blogs are giving people a social alternative to political interaction.
Certainly my personal little section of the blogosphere (which is the term for the
community of blogs) is dedicated to throwing spanners rather than oil into the political
machinery of state. Democracy is just politics and politics, and like the established media
which panders to it, it is a crude tool for representing the reality of any society it claims
to 'serve' « well, they serve it in the farming sense of the word I suppose. Y

Annalee Newitz, one of the more interesting US writers on cyberculture, commented that Y

what the blog threatens to do is dislodge the traditional news media's corner on the
"scoop" market. With their unorthodox reporting strategies and lightning -fast publishing
schedules, blogs are making it clear that you don't need to have some big, fancy
newspaper job to break stories. In fact, you don't even need to write stories; you can
just throw a couple of sentences up on your site with some telling links. Y

A quote attributed to Nick Denton defended blogging by saying Y

it's implicit in the way that a website is produced that our standards of accuracy are
lower. Besides, immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more
important than accuracyY

A collection of views by journalists on journalism and blogging was published ( PDF) by

the Niemann Foundation for Journalism at Harvard in 2003. Other perspectives are
provided in 






  
 (Carlton: Melbourne Uni Press
2005) edited by Jonathan Mills and  A Œ
 

#
 

 



 
$  A (New York: Free Press 2007) by Scott Gant.

The Perseus survey noted on preceding pages of this profile resulted in the claim that Y

Blogs are famed for their linkages, and while 80.8% of active blogs linked to at least one
external site from a post on their home page, these links were rarely to traditional news
sources. Blogs are updated much less often than generally thought. Active blogs were
updated on average every 14 days. Only 106,579 of the hosted blogs were updated on
average at least once a week. Fewer than 50,000 were updated daily.Y

In responding to a self-proclaimed "blog daddy" #
% 

Executive Editor Bill
Keller asked whether the blogosphere "needs an equivalent of the courtroom admonition
'asked and answered'Y

It is massively inclusive but everyone brings to it an individual appetite and a sense of

entitlement, regardless of whether they have done the homework. You can join the
discussion from a position of raw, opinionated ignorance. Sometimes the result is le ss a
conversation than a clamor. Last time, I expressed some frustration that thrice-removed
versions of something I said had scattered across the digital globe and prompted
reactions that bore no relation to anything I had actually said or thought. Your s olution,
if I get your drift, was that I should go blog -to-blog, dropping in and conversing, winning
friends and setting the record straight. Easy for you to say, since you seem to live
without sleep. By the same standard, I could probably win friends for  
by
going door to door in Queens, extolling and explaining the paper to prospective readers,
but is that the best use of my time? Direct democracy may work in a Swedish canton,
but it doesn't scale very well, and I kind of think the same thing is true of "citizen's"
journalism. I suspect that for blogging to achieve the status its practitioners aspire to, it
will have to become a bit less retail, a little more edited, a little more a product of
judgment. In other word, a bit more...like us, the MSM . In fact, it is already happening,
isn't it?

One thing we have not discussed about blogs is the extent to which they are a waste of
time. The thing that struck me during my week or so of very elementary and
intermittent bloggery is that it is very seductive. (It also helps overcome byline
withdrawal.) It would be easy to shirk my job and swap thoughts with you and yours,
and the time flies by and at the end we've generated an exchange that will be skimmed
in haste by some number of people, to what end? An d the same thing that is true of
blogging is true of reading blogs, which I do pretty regularly: you can while away
endless hours, skipping over the surface of half-baked thoughts and every so often
colliding with something original or unexpected. Or you c ould play with your kids. Or go
to a museum. Or read a good book. (Or a good newspaper!) The blogosphere may be
interactive, but can you honestly say that the ratio of thoughtful conversation to
meaningless chatter is any higher than it is on, say, cable TV talk shows? For now, at
least, I prefer a newspaper -- even granting that it costs more and that I am -- in part --
entrusting the acquisition of information, the selection of what's important and the
making sense of it to someone else. For now, for me, bloggers are a prequel and a
sequel, but not the main event. But I would say that, wouldn't I? Y




Dot-pop pundit Clay Shirky enthused in the 2002 *


"

A 1


*
  thatY

weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written
word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing
to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct,
weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is
true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who
earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly.Y

Questions about the 'busker' model for publishing are highlighted in the 1999 paper by
John Kelsey and Bruce Schneierf on ë  
 

&
.
Shirky dismisses the viability of 'blogging for dollars' (discussed later in this profile), as Y

the search for direct fees is driven by the belief that, since weblogs make publishing
easy, they should lower the barriers to becoming a professional writer. This assumption
has it backwards, because mass professionalization is an oxymoron; a professional class
implies a minority of members. The principal effect of weblogs is instead mass
amateurization. ...

Traditional publishing creates value in two ways. The first is intrinsic: it takes real work
to publish anything in print, and more work to store, ship, and sell it. Because the up -
front costs are large, and because each additional copy generates some additional cost,
the number of potential publishers is limited to organizations prepared to support these
costs. (These are barriers to entry.) And since it's most efficient to distribute those costs
over the widest possible audience, big publishers will outperform little ones. (These are
economies of scale.) The cost of print insures that there will be a small number of
publishers, and of those, the big ones will have a disproportionately large market share.

Weblogs destroy this intrinsic value, because they are a platform for the unlimited
reproduction and distribution of the written word, for a low and fixed cost. No barriers to
entry, no economies of scale, no limits on supply.

Print publishing also creates extrinsic value, as an indicator of quality. A book's physical
presence says "Someone thought this was worth risking money on." Because large-scale
print publishing costs so much, anyone who wants to be a published author has to
convince a professionally skeptical system to take that risk. You can see how much we
rely on this signal of value by reflecting on our attitudes towards vanity press
publications.

Weblogs destroy this extrinsic value as well. Print publishing acts as a filter, weblogs do
not. Whatever you want to offer the world - a draft of your novel, your thoughts on the
war, your shopping list - you get to do it, and any filtering happens after the fact,
through mechanisms like blogdex and Google. Publishing your writing in a weblog
creates none of the imprimatur of having it published in print.

This destruction of value is what makes weblogs so important. We want a world where
global publishing is effortless. We want a world where you don't have to ask for help or
permission to write out lou d.Y

Mark Hurst of CreativeGood more acutely commented in 2003 thatY

Pre-Internet publishing models have always operated within some scarcity: raw material
(paper, film, reproduction time), geographic reach, distribution costs. The Internet flips
those models upside down. Online, there is an overabundance of those things that were
once scarce. Bits are free, the geography is everywhere, and distribution is worldwide,
instantly. The only cost is in promoting the URL. But the remarkable ease-of-use makes
it very attractive indeed to publish bits, despite the lack of consumers. These average
online authors might put it this way: why NOT publish your thoughts, your pictures, your
life? It's nearly free to do so, and any user who happens to show up is just gravy.

So get ready for more, and more, and still more publishing online of everyone's daily
thoughts, pictures, and occurrences. In an environment of abundance, the lack of
consumers won't deter the creative processY


 


 


Somewhat to the surprise of blogging zealots, concerns regarding blogs have not been
addressed through a discrete legal code that seeks to address all issues or provide
special privileges for "citizens of blogistan". There is no 'law of blogging'.

Instead, bloggers face the same legal challenges as other online authors, subject to a
range of existing 'information law'. That law has a national (and on occasion provincial)
basis: there are no international standards and restriction s (or protections) vary from
country to country.

Overall, blogging is potentially affected by statute and case law regarding -Y

Y defamationY

Y censorship (including blasphemy, suicide and hatespeech) Y

Y confidentialityY

Y national securityY

Y intellectual property (including copyright and trademarks) Y

Y stalking, discrimination and bullyingY

Y crimes such as extortion Y

#

% '

As we have suggested throughout this site, publishi ng online does not occur in a legal
vacuum.

There have been a number of defamation actions about statements in blogs, directed
against individual authors and against internet service providers and content hosting
providers, some of which have also faced action over alleged trade practices offences.

Sites such as LiveJournal have increasingly stressed 'being nice' and offered instructions
for what to do if one member of the online community is "hateful" to other members, eg
makes egregiously offensive comments, threats or 'stalks' another bloggers.

Scott Rosenberg at a 2002 UC event on blogging & journalism argued that Y

blogging is really an online media format, it's really not a movement. I view it as a form
of writing and a form of media that's native to the Web. Journalists are already doing
things with the weblogging tool that they wouldn't have thought possible a couple of
years ago. That may be why you had some of that resistance at first, the sense that it
was going to become institutionalized, and the purist ideal of the blogger as the lone
word slinger, beholden to no one, would be placed in jeopardy.

One of the key issues facing the collision of journalism and blogging today is the
question of editing. Blogging tools today don't allow for much of an editing process. Part
of what attracts people to blogging is, no one can tell me what to write. Part of what
journalists uphol d as part of their tradition is that more than one set of eyes reviews
materials before it's released to the public.Y

Brendan O'Neill commented thatY

If bloggers want to spend their time fact-checking the traditional media's ass, that's fine
- and some of them even do it entertainingly. But when that becomes a major focus of
blogging, it hardly points to a 'radical transformation' of the 'journalistic c ulture'. Blogs
come across less as a revolutionary vanguard remaking journalism into something new
and dynamic, and more like traditional journalism's poor cousin - putting it down, picking
holes in its arguments, and generally having a good old moan about the Fisks and
Krugmans of the world.

... if bloggers fancy themselves as cutting-edge 'new journalists' giving the old media a
run for its money, they'll have to do more than post quickfire comments in response to
already published material or breaking news or another blogger's comments about
another blogger's comments. Perhaps they could start by generating some new content. Y

In a rare example of historical consciousness he suggests that Y

The rise of blogging on the web, and the way in which it has been ha iled as a media
revolution not only by bloggers but also by some newspapers, reflects recent shifts
within journalism itself. In the traditional media, everywhere from the papers to the TV,
there has been a rise in personal opinions and emotionally respons ive journalism over
objectivity and hard-hitting investigation. Of course, there's nothing wrong with opinion
journalism, especially if the journalist has got something to say. But too often today,
much opinion writing seems to be driven more by feelings a nd emotions than by insight
or having a distinct argument to put forward. Y

Offenses aren't restricted to adults. An educator wrote in the 

 


 in
September 2003 that blogs, like chat rooms, are "the latest sites of Internet cruelty" by
children against children -Y

Blogs are cyber reality shows, widely read diaries that publicly detail the social drama
and fluctuating emotions of young lives. They are often scoured for personal mention,
and they spare no language or feelings ...This isn't likely to be some child of poverty or
deprivation speaking. Internet bullying involves a population that is largely middle-class,
usually known as the "good kids" who are "on the right track" or, as many school
personnel told me, "the ones you'd least expect" to bully or degrade others. The Internet
foments outrageous behavior in part because it is a "gray area" for social interactions.

... the Internet deletes social inhibitions. "It allows kids to say and do things that they
wouldn't do face-to-face, and they feel like they won't be held accountable in the same
way. It gives them a false sense of security and power." The kids themselves agree ...
"E-mails are so much less personal ... They're so much less formal and more indirect,
and it's easier for people to be more candid and even meaner because of that. People
can be as mean and vicious as they want because they're not directly confronting th e
person. It's the same thing as when you're talking on the phone because you don't have
to face the person directly. This is a step further removed. You don't even have to hear
the person's voice or see their reaction."Y

The 

 noted that Y

In matters of discipline, the proprietary nature of personal Web pages and blogs is
pitting ethics against rights, or what kids know about bullying against what they know
about personal freedoms of speech and intellectual property. When a child is
reprimanded for negative or hateful speech on a personal Web page, she may invoke her
right to write what she wants in a semi-private space. And the parents often go along. ...
"Some parents are so concerned about respecting their children's rights that they see
email as a privacy issue."

When a child is disciplined, the parent has two reactions. One is, 'Who gave that to you?'
And, 'These e-mails are the private property of my daughter. You can't admit that
evidence into any court.'Y
A later page of this profile suggests that teen blogging may be even more fraught.

 


Blogging is not situated in a historical vacuum and like other text is potentially subject to
censorship on grounds of offences that encompass obscenity, secrets or political
subversion.

The boilerplate for most blog hosting services features restrictions on the inclusion of
erotic or other adult content. So far there has been little coverage of blog entries (or
whole blogs) taken offline at the request of a service operator or direction from a
regulatory agency.

Most media attention has instead centred on Y

Y blogging as a mechanism for free speech - in particular South American blogs
hosted in the EU or US Y

Y government use of firewalls to stop citizens using external hosting to publish
potentially dissident blogs, for example recurrent Chinese government blocks on
Blogspot identified by Ben Edelman and filtering in Iran Y

Y 'insider' accounts such as the 'Baghdad Blogger' Salam Pax, hyped as "the Anne
Frank of the War ... and its Elvis". Y

Given the popularity of the Pax blog (adopted by the UK '  ) we can presumably
expect to see ,
 style disinformation blogging - an extension of the growth of
corporate blogs - in the next war.

Action to inhibit blogging has taken various forms, including prohibitions on blogging,
mandatory registration of blogs and takedown orders. China, for example, requires
registration of blogs, justified on the basis that Y

The internet has profited many people but it also has brought many probl ems, such as
sex, violence and feudal superstitions and other harmful information that has seriously
poisoned people's spirits Y

AccordinglyY

A net crawler system will monitor the sites in real time and search each web address for
its registration number. It will report back to the ministry if it finds a site thought to be
unregistered Y

In May 2006 veteran dissident writer Yang Tianshui was sentenced to 12 years in prison
for subversion after he blogged in support of free elections.

Other regimes have simply frozen access on occasion. In 2006 for example the Indian
national government forced service providers to cut consumer access to Blogspot,
Typepad, Geocities and other sites after terrorist bombings in Mumbai. The federal
department of telecommunications justified the restrictions on grounds of national
security, claiming that it aimed to close 17 blogs that carried material from political and
religious extremists.

Lawyer Sanjukta Basu lamented "This is a clearly an infringement of fundamental right"

of free speech and noted that a 300-strong Delhi blogging community is considering a
petition to the high court. The Indian establishment is presumably quaking in its boots ˜
Y
ºc 


 


Can individuals make a living as bloggers?

As an earlier page noted, visions of 'blogging for dollars' - whether through donations
from kind-hearted readers, some form of subscription by readers, patronage by a
maecenas, subvention by a corporate sponsor or sale of advertising space - have
provoked disagreement among the blogerati.

They have also provoked hype from some commercial services, with one for example
shrilling Y

Start Blogging Now

Publish, be read, and get paid.
Begin writing instantly! Y

and quoting a satisfied customer who proclaimed Y

I was happy living with writer's block. Now I am constantly reading other blogs, and
looking for new things to write about. Life hasn't been the same since! Y

Michael Malone gushed that -Y

Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic
engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell
phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news and has created a
whole new group of major media companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will
be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies. Y

Clay Shirky enthused in the 2002 *


"

A 1

*
  that
-Y

weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written
word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing
to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct,
weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is
true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who
earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly.Y

Blog evangelist Meg Hourihan was characteristically more upbeat, enthusing - Y

Think of what some of the best bloggers could do if they were financially able to do
focused, full-time blogging? Pick a topic you're interested in, now imagine someone had
40 hours per week to cover everything related to that topic, and you get the idea. Y

The notion of corporate support through sponsorsh ip or advertising has been attacked as
"selling out to the System", provoking Tony Perkins of Always-On (the 'super blog'
badged as "the insiders network") to sniff that he had heard such "religious ly libertarian
anarchists with ponytails screaming and yelling before" - one of those comments that
secured attention from all the 'insiders' in the echoing blogosphere.

Mark Dery offered a dose of realism, questioning -Y

Who, exactly, is making a living shoveling prose online? Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds?
Jason Kottke? Josh Marshall? To the best of my knowledge, only a vanishingly tiny
number of bloggers are able to eke out an existence through their blogging, much less
turn a healthy profit.

For now, visions of getting rich through self -publishing look a lot like envelope -stuffing
for the cognitive elite ² or at least for insomniacs with enough time and bandwidth to
run their legs to stumps in their electronic hamster wheels, posting and answering
comments 24/7. As a venerable hack toiling in the fields of academe, I love the idea of
being King of All Media without even wearing pants, which is why I hope that some new -
media wonk like Jason Calacanis or Jeff Jarvis finds the Holy Grail of self-winding
journalism ² i.e., figuring out how to make online writing self -supporting. Y

'  



The notion of using blogs as platforms for advertising has attracted attention because of
perceptions that the readership is loyal and is associated with desirable demographics.

Those perceptions are largely untested. Few bloggers have disclosed detailed information
about their audiences. Most accounts of traffic are anecdotal and many don't extend
beyond the comment that another blog has linked to the particular site or that the
author has received feedback.

Few bloggers have had much success in calling for money from readers. It is unclear
whether initial enthusiasm for paying Andrew Sullivan, often characterised as the
prototypical commercial blogger (with claims that revenue is around US$6,000 per
week), has been sustained. Claims in the July 2006 Pew Internet & American Life Project
report that "8% of bloggers earn money on their blog" are problematical.

In questioning some of the hype about performance and the 'busker economy' we have
suggested that some people could make a living reading from a telep hone directory ...
but that those people are exceptional: enthusiasm and a keyboard, irrespective of an
online tip-jar, is unlikely to provide a living for most bloggers.

One blogger somewhat sourly commented - Y

Ever since Andrew Sullivan conducted his "Pledge Week" and made damned near
$80,000, bloggers everywhere have become panhandlers and squeegie -guys, telling
their heart-rending stories of brokeness while pointing to their Pay Pa l buttons and tip
jars. When hookers do that on the street, they get arrested for the crime of
"solicitation." And the hookers usually offer a more valuable commodity than most blogs
do.Y

before going on to comment -Y

I work a 10-or-more hour a day job five days every week and every 7th weekend. I have
a 30-mile commute back and forth. I blog because I enjoy doing it, but I make my living
from that job, so I BLOG ONLY WHEN I'M NOT WORKING. If I had to make a choice
between blogging and work, guess what it wou ld be? Hint: one pays the bills and the
other COSTS money.

I crave attention, adoration, lots of traffic and a loyal following, but I don't want a dime
of your money. If I can't afford to do this, I SHOULDN'T BE DOING IT. I should be doing
something that pays me money.Y
In practice those bloggers who gain tangible revenue are those whose online writing has
attracted sufficient attention for them to secure gigs on the lecture circuit (such as Mr
Shirky), deals from commercial publishers or appointments to academic faculties and
institutional boards or other posts. Busking, rather than blogging, is the way to go.

Entrepreneurs such as Nick Denton of the Gawker group, echoing 'old media', have
sought to market blogs as a commodity - employing teams of writers on advertising-
supported sites.

 





US start-up BloggingNetwork (BN) - "write and get paid!" - more daringly promotes a
walled garden approach, with readers paying a monthly fee to access a collection of
blogs.

Authors receive a share of that revenue and can also gain referral fees by securing other
bloggers for the BN Community. Apparently around 50% of revenue goes to "support the
web site, marketing, customer service, and payment processing".

The ongoing success of the venture for the BN operators and the bloggers within the
garden is uncertain.

It is unclear whether the operators will secure sufficient readers and authors for
sustainability and whether provision of data to third parties will be commercially
attractive.

One observer commented that - Y

as long as people insist that web content, and especially independently created web
content like blogs, isn't worth paying for, the Web will never reach its full potential. After
all, a free web (or an ad-sponsored web) ends up favoring traditional, corporate media:
they're the ones who can afford to subsidize consistent content creation over long
periods of time; they're the ones with the scale to make advertising at least potentially
viable; they're the ones who can buy up the best talent that emerges. Y

Critics have argued that BN is damned - if not doomed - because it has established a
blogging ghetto. Placing content behind a firewall (whether a whole blog or premium
content) will deter some readers. As with free versus pay access to online journals and
other sites, some readers will simply refuse to pay and will instead seek free content,
which is readily available. Others may be willing to pay for access but ask whether the
BN content is more attractive than that on other subscription sites.

Those authors who secure sufficient revenue through BN to make blogging commercially
worthwhile are presumably those who would make as much, if not more, money writing
for commercial journals or through appearances.

 


2004 saw allegations that Fark.com - "one of the most popular blogs on the Net" - has
been selling preferential placement of links. By late 2006 it was clear that individuals and
blog networks were busily touting particular products, services and individuals on a
commercial basis, often with no disclosure that payment was involved. That is
reminiscent of the 'cash for comment' scandal involving Australian radio shockjocks.

In December 2006 the US Federal Trade Commission reminded companies of the need to
disclose relationships in which people are compensated to promote products to their
peers, including blogs and other 'word -of-mouth marketing'.
Such marketing is covered under regulations that govern commercial endorsements; the
FTC the FTC opinion was to formally note that it could be deceptive if consumers were
more likely to trust the product's endorser "based on their assumed indepe ndence from
the marketer".

Ethics and legal requirements aside, critics have suggested that covert promotion
through blogs and other media may simply be bad business practice, given adverse
responses if consumers discover that the 'recommendation' has been paid for.

A 2005 survey in the US by Intelliseek for example reported that 29% of participants in
the 20 to 34 cohort and 41% of those in the 35 to 49 cohort indicated that they would
be unlikely to trust recommendations from a friend whom they later learned was paid for
making a recommendation.

Other bloggers might instead use discovery (or suspicion) of payment as an opportunity
for the denunciation that fuels much of the blogosphere.



 
##

One of the first major efforts to embody a blog in offline print is the UK '  's
opportunistic ë 3
 (London: Guardian Books 2003) by Salam
Pax - aka the Baghdad Blogger - who as noted earlier in this profile has been promoted
as "the Anne Frank of the War ... and its Elvis". It is perhaps just as well that low
teledensity in Rwanda spared us the horrors of a blog during that nation's ethnic
massacres.

We can, however, expect to see print and filmed versions of real and faux blogs, building
on works such as Klein's   )


, ë& ,  

A 
,  
Œ

,  
and Nicholson Baker's 2
3 that are highlighted later in this profile.

They in turn trace their lineage to epistolary novels and redacted reportage such as
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's $
 


 

(1782) and Goethe's  
 
ë& 1 (1779).

Examples include Y

Y ë  ", ) (London: Ebury Press 2006) by Stephanie Klein Y

Y 

 0
+$ ,
&

ë
 
  A

(New York: Simon & Schuster 2006) by Matthew Burden ... "All the officers in the
book are competent; all the enlisted men and women are brave; and all the
husbands love their wives and vice versa"Y

Y   ' 

  (New York: The Feminist Press 2005) by
Riverbend Y

Y #!  

 
+
%




(Berkeley: Apress 2006)
edited by Bonnie Burton & Alan Graham Y

Y A  


(Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press 2005) by Nasrin Alavi Y

Y 


%
ë3,  
- 



 +' A! 
+


ë3

(New York: Carroll & Graf 2005) edited by Maxim
Jakubowski Y

Y  Œ
 ,  )
 % ) ' (New York: Warner 2006) by
Anonymous Y

Y A
)

$) A#
! (New York: Holt 2006) by Jeremy Blachman Y

Y   


 
%

 * (New York: Vintage 2008) edited
by Sarah Boxer Y
Journalists are increasingly peddling hardcopy of their blogs. One example is Margo
Kingston's #
) Œ
7 (Ringwood: Penguin 2004), based on her Fairfax blog and
criticised by the great Max Suich as having Y

the weaknesses of a lot of material on the web - little or no editing, overblown language
and personal rage or frustration masquerading as moral criticism. It's therapy rather
than thought for a lot of the webbies. Y

The genre has inevitably been colonised by those in search of something that is hip or
merely amusing. 

'



$ 
'


& ! (Sisters: Multnomah 2005) by Lanny Donoho
asks "How would you feel if you thought God wrote a personal note to you ... on His
website" (presumably as nonplussed as if She sent us an SMS). We were somewhat
more engaged by Paul Davidson's $



0
Œ


Π


+


& )&& 
 )0 & 

)* ,  

! )

8
 
(New York: Warner 2006).Y

!
(!


 


Mainstreaming of blogging - and reduced opportunities for digital gurus after the
excesses of the 1990s boom - have been reflected in emergence of the corporate blog or
enterprise blog.

It is a phenomenon that has arguably attracted more theorists and observers than actual
practitioners, with a proliferation of academic seminars, self-promotion by corporate
blogging enthusiasts and often uncritical reception by members of the blogosphere.
Estimates of uptake by business and non-government organisations are problematical,
as much is presumably taking place behind firewalls on corporate intranets.

Corporate blogging has essentially taken two forms.

The first is blogging    organisations, sometimes characterised as 'organisation

memory', 'knowledge blogs' (aka k-logs or klogs) or 'competitor intelligence' blogs.

It aims to capture an organisation's tacit knowledge, provide a readily accessible

repository of expertise, facilitate project development, provide an annotated clipping
service about developments outside the organisation or merely serve as a new
communication mechanism across offices and divisions.

The second form is blogging directed


 the organisation, aimed at building a bridge
between the organisation and its customers or other stakeholders. 

Such blogs have variously reported on a particular enterprise's activities or sought to

engage the interest of consumers in a specific brand or product.

There are few accepted benchmarks for assessing the success of uptake by
organisations. It is unclear whether corporate blogging delivers better results than
traditional mechanisms for sharing information or, more broadly, for building a positive
corporate culture.






Inevitably, media hubbub about blogging has been expl oited by the business consulting
industry.

A range of pundits have accordingly explained how large organisations can -Y

Y replace their tired internal newsletters (in print or electronic formats) and blizzard
of memoranda with a corporate blog Y

Y facilitate knowledge management (KM), organisation memory (OM) and collective
activity across units/locations through group blogs published on the corporate
intranet, supplementing or replacing information sharing through mechanisms
such as Lotus Notes Y

Y build teams ("the blog on your intranet is a club-house ... a tree-house for your
people, where everyone can join in") Y

Y enhance competitor intelligence, equipping executives and staff with a flow of
news items or other information from outside the information and enabling those
readers to 'value add' by commenting on such news feeds Y

Y underpin marketing through a blog aimed at readers outside the organisation Y

The effectiveness of such prescriptions is uncertain. As we noted above, figures about

intranet blogs and wikis are contentious, if only because most are protected by corporate
firewalls. Few organisations disclose their existence; fewer still provide an indication of
costs and outcomes.

In considering blogs aimed at employees it is unclear whether an intranet blog crafted in

the internal public relations unit or by the CEO's executive assistant will be seen as more
appetising, authentic or trustworthy than current offerings. Blogging as a mechanism for
sharing expertise among staff - discussed later in this profile - may be attractive simply
because most technical manuals are indigestible (although identifying the content and
status of information in a manual may be easier).

There are few serious studies about work-group implementation and many of the
statements about perceived benefits appear to have been adapted from problematical
assertions about the value of blogging  
.

One "blog evangelist" for example argues that Y

Different voices can appear ² In every workgroup there are those who are outspoken
and comfortable expressing themselves in meetings, and there are those who aren't.
When group conversations are limited to vocal interactions, the group often misses out
on the opinions of those who are sh y or quiet. With the weblog as an additional
communication outlet, the voices that are rarely heard in meetings may open up through
writing. People who aren't comfortable speaking on the spot may find the asynchronous
nature of the blog more appealing. Som eone loath to suggest an idea in a meeting may
feel perfectly comfortable proposing it to the group via the blog. The removal of face -to-
face conversation changes the dynamic of the interaction, and that results in different
conversations. Y

We suggest that some voices might however be wary about going on record: a spoken
comment during a meeting is unlikely to be as permanent as text that is accessible on
the intranet of a national or international organisation. Having a keyboard - or a
corporate treehouse - doesn't mean that everyone can write or wants to play.

Another calls on organisations to Y

Give everyone in your firm ways to speak online in public. Blogs, bulletin boards, wikis ,
whatever. Let them write about anything. They spend 2000 hours a year working for you
so life at your company will bleed out into the world through a multitude of personal
voices. Y

Another advocate comments thatY

Blogs help write thought pieces to guide the organisation on a strategic path. Bloggers
can collect and connect information and provide useful overlays o f context. Y

A UK government enthusiast embraced David Wyld's vision in 2007, proclaiming that

"blogging could become a whole new style of management" (alas referring to past quick
fix fads such as 'management by wandering around'). Y

When this idea was proposed in the 1980s, wandering meant phyisically being
someplace - a factory floor, a store . . . or an employee or constituent's office. But to be
an effective leader today, we must wander online. Y

$

#

  

Michael Herman perceptively notes that "for those that have been around long enough,
blogging is another instance of the 'technology wheel of reincarnation'", commenting on
scope for overplaying the analogy of corporate blogging and water cooler conversation. Y

The interaction is nothing like water cooler conversation. Blogging is inherently neither
two-way nor conversational. Rather blogging is a high -tech version of bathroom graffiti
that enables a person to: Y

a) scan (and optionally read) thousands of cubicle walls with little or no effort, and

b) during a moment of contemplation, add a few new scribbles to their stall wall Y

Nothing more. Y

Microsoft blogger Philip Su apologised thatY

Deep in the bowels of Windows (the business), there remains the whiff of a bygone
culture of belittlement and aggression. Windows can be a scary place to tell the truth. Y

One blogger reflected comments earlier in this profile, suggesting that Y

most companies don't see the value of having people document anything, much less
their daily thoughts. Mostly this is an ROI problem (or a perceived one). Writing good
documentation is hard; writing a weblog that is worth the company time it takes to write
it (remember, most people won't write on their own time to benefit the company) is also
hard ...

If somebody is a good writer, they're probably not going to be using that energy for the
benefit of the company; they probably have their own weblog out there that talks about
stuff they really care about, or some other creative project outside the company's
control Y

Much of the hype about corporate blogging is an echo of misplaced enthusiasm for
groupware (from which few organisations have secured the expected return s) and more
broadly for knowledge management, highlighted in works such as 8
 *
(London: Kogon Page 2000), 
% 8
  (Boston: Harvard Business School
Press 2000) by Thomas Davenport & Laurence Prusak, 8
 "
  

(London: Butterworth 2000) by Eric Lesser, Michael Fontaine & Jason Slusher and
Davenport's 

&

)
 

8
 
!
 (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1997).

It also assumes that all organisations are the same or - with a dash of klogging - could
be.

Many organisations are poorly equipped to launch and maintain work unit blogs or wikis
because there are Y

Y few precedentsY

Y few champions within the organisation or its peersY

Y perceptions that blogging is not 'real work' Y

Y an inability, in practice, to measure the return on investment in blogging Y

Y uncertainties about the autonomy of authors Y

Y concerns about responses if particular text is disputed or inappropriate Y

Y often substantial existing investments in groupware (ie in licensing, hardware,
training of users and management mechanisms) and content management
systemsY

Y a culture that doesn't support autonomous information collection and expression,
particularly to readers outside the organisation. Y

Some intranet blogs, for example, have only come to public attention when particular
posts have expunged or the organisation has belatedly developed a policy on internal
and external blogging. In 2005 Microsoft announced that it w as "abbreviating" Microsoft
Developer Network (MSDN) blogs on its site and in syndication, claiming a "bandwidth
crunch". It had earlier fired a temp who had naughtily hosted snaps of Apple computers
sitting on a MS loading dock. As part of the big crunch MS ceased providing the full text
of MSDN posts via RSS, requiring the audience to follow a link. Sony BMG on the other
hand announced in 2007 that all senior "creative" staff would be expected to blog.

Such concerns have not deterred specialist businesses that offer to manage the
corporate blogging process or even ghost a blog on behalf of a work group or the wider
organisation.

One of our more irreverent clients compares that process to 1970s experiments with
poets in residence - creativity was apparently supposed to diffuse from "an unwashed
zany longhair" and be absorbed by osmosis - and the adventure training found in
organisations that fell victim to the paintball -&-chainsaw zeitgeist.

#%
!





  )



 % 



(New York: Wiley 2006) by Robert Scoble & Shel Israel exemplified euphoria about
blogging as an unprecedented mechanism for breaking down barriers (or merely
dissolving old institu tional forms and large corporations). By mid-2008 reality had hit,
with Israel complaining that Y

There seems to be a growing sense that social media just ain't what it used to be that it
too, is starting to emerge as yet another wasteland for product pusher s and shameless
self promoters.Y

That is hardly surprising, given the shamelessness and self-interest of many self-
described blog evangelists.


#
#


A blogging advocate asks Y

Imagine the internal individual blog of a charismatic CEO. Instead of (or in addition to)
those Friday afternoon pep talks and the monthly e-mailing of the vision statement,
what if the CEO was constantly communicating with the organization through her
weblog? The informal tone and personal nature would move beyond the image of CEO as
corporate figurehead, and reveal the CEO as a human being. Y

It is an attractive image. We wonder, however, whether reality might be more difficult.

Would the staff retrospectively savour the musings of the CEO about loneliness at the
top - or the chairman's exhilaration about racing his 72 metre yacht - on hearing that a
division is to be eliminated or offshored to Bangalore? What if they are all able to
scribble on a cubicle wall ... and interact with members of the public or competitors who
can read the digital graffiti?

The #
% 

commented in 2006 that Y

Outside the technology field, only one other Fortune 500 company has had a C.E.O. who
has called himself a blogger, John P. Mackey of Whole Foods Market. Mr. Mackey has
made a total of six posts over the course of 10 months, and these consist of reprints of
speeches and interviews and similar materials created originally for a different purpose.
Using blogging softw are to park a reprint once every two months does not a blog make. Y

And would bloggers within a government agency bother to put paws to keyboard if they
knew that comment about the latest budget cuts or bold ministerial initiative would be
identified and expunged by a corporate PR or IT unit that has never embraced the 'tree-
house' model?

Those concerns - and anxieties about inappropriate disclosure of sensitive information,

personal defamation, exposure to liability or misplaced criticism of competitors - are not
restricted to blogs.

They are the same issues that have inhibited a range of corporate media such as
newsletters and have proved resistant to prescriptions by Freire, Bakhtin or Michel de
Certeau evident in works such as Christine Boese's 2004 paper ë 

0  

 ë  
8
  +$
!

, with claims that klogs Y

bring a hidden and newly awakened army of interactive participants who may be
experiencing the kinds of unsettling (to the powers that be) critical consciousness that is
within the goals of an increasingly democratized culture Y

A blog comment on that paper hails de Certeau's Y

concept of the "wig" - a diversionary tactic, in which workers pursue their own agendas
on company time (without actually pilfering, or being unavailable for "real" work should
they need to reprioritize) Y

a concept that will gladden the hearts of Negri & Hardt but presumably not delight
managers and colleagues in most SMEs or large organisations.

In practice much 'human face' writing appears to be like the following gem from Demos
("a greenhouse for new ideas") - Y

One of the coolest pieces of kit in our new office is by far the saddle stitcher on our
Canon. Alright, so I may be alone in my evangelism, but it does do one thing very, very
well. It prints pdfs as A4 and A5 booklets. For that matter, drop in a stack of single-sided
pages, tap a few keys, and after a bit of rumbling it spits out a nicely folded, properly
paginated, double-stapled book -- while using only a quarter of the paper you scanned Y

Knowledge management guru Jerry Bowles offered five reasons why CEOs shouldn't blog
-Y

1 "Just as CEOs dont do their own television commercials they should not blog. Blogging
is a form of public performance and unless you are a natural ... you might embarrass
yourself and your company."
2 "Blogging is timeconsuming. Unless you can spare and commit to the three -to-four
hours a week that it will take to write a couple of decent posts, don't do it as you'll end
up with a deserted blog"
3 Legal hurdles - "You may come up against intellectual property issues, possible
defamation claims or unhappy employees or customers chasing common -law tort action
..."
4 "Fading fads ... the CEO Blog has been over -hyped and may not age well"
5 "The foot-in-mouth syndrome ..." Y

David Wyld's 2007 
 !

'
!  A
*/4 (PDF)
instead offers "10 Tips for Blogging by Public Sector Executives" -Y

1: Define yourself and your purpose

2: Do it yourself!
3: Make a time commitment
4: Be regular
5: Be generous
6: Have a "hard hide"
7: Spell-check
8: Dont give too much information
9: Consider multimedia
10: Be a student of blogging. Y

Some CEOS and celebrities appear to be deciding that it's all too hard (or that,
unsurprisingly, their time is better spent elsewhere) and are accordingly relying on ghost
bloggers.

The US Blog Council , established in 2007 as "a community for official corporate blogs
and bloggers that represent major global corporations", announced that Y

Personal blogs, small-business bloggers, and blog experts don't face the same business
issues that we do.
‡ We need to speak for our corporations while being a responsible member of the blog
community.
‡ We have to speak for a corporation, but never sound corporate.
‡ We have to reconcile the often contrasting rules of corporate communications and blog
etiquette.
‡ There are few resources specific to the unique needs of this community.
And we have to learn how to do it live, real -time, in the public eye. Y

Apart from legitimating the new 'corporate blogging pr ofessional' the grandly-named
Blog Council aspires to act "as a strong advocate in support of responsible, ethics -based
corporate blogging", presumably with the same credibility as advertising councils have
supported "responsible, ethics-based" advertising.


' 

The ongoing market for 'reinvention' of government (particularly through application of
the latest communication tool or management fad, is evident in suggestions that
blogging can bridge gaps between votes and their elected representatives or energise an
inward-looking unresponsive bureaucracy.

Wyld indicated that Y

Overall, we can develop a typology of four different types of blogs for public officials.

First, the Travel blog: These highlight elected officials' travels in a nd around their district
or jurisdiction, or perhaps foreign trips. Y

A sceptic might question the wisdom of publishing accounts of an MP's labours in the
Bahamas while the voters and subordinates shiver in Buffalo?

Wyld continued by proposing - Y

Second, the Blow-by-blow blog: These emphasise reports from elected representatives
while their respective deliberative body is in session. In this way, officials can update
constituents on the status of pending bills and other actions.

Third, the Personal blog: T hese provides elected officials' views on particular issues,
perspectives on events, and/or updates on their activities and even those of their
families and friends.

And fourth, the Team blog: these allow a caucus or group of elected
representatives/officials to share a blog. ... Creating a common site reduces the burden
on individual officials to administer the blog, while creating the prospect for more
frequent updates because of the number of contributors to the blog.

A final option for blogging by pub lic officials is to post on other blogs rather than
maintain one of their own. By posting on such a third -party site, such as that of a
newspaper or magazine, the official is freed from having to maintain the blog. However,
once a post is made to another blog, the member does lose control of the ability to
control the message and the comments made to it. Y

He notes that "there is often skepticism among readers when any famous name appears
associated with a post as to authenticity". Quite.

)

2004 and 2005 saw chatter in the blogosphere about blog -related firings, ie dismissal of
employees for comments made in blogs.

Contrary to some hysteria at that time there does not appear to have been an
"epidemic" of dismissals in Australia, the US, Canada or elsewhere.

That has variously been attributed to -Y

Y organisations relying on persuasion rather than terminating what one contact
characterised as "gabby staff"Y

Y employer use of non-disclosure agreements in firing personnel Y

Y employer reliance on other justifications in dismissing employee (eg the offensive
blog post may have been the real reason for departure but the employer used
other reasons in identifying why the blogger was let go) Y

Y the rarity of egregious posts by employees and a sensible attitude by employers
in dealing with inappropriate comment Y

Y ignorance or even indifference on the part of employers regarding what personnel
are posting on company time and on a purely private basis. Y

Blog-related exits are discussed in more detail later in this profile.



Forward-looking organisations seeking to avoid unpleasantness have typically developed

protocols covering blogging by staff.

Sun for example has issued guidelines (PDF) on blogging by its staff, with "important
rules" that include -Y

1. Do not disclose or speculate on non -public financial or operational information. The

legal consequences could be swift and severe for you and Sun.
2. Do not disclose non -public technical information (for example, code) without approval.
Sun could instantly lose its right to export its products and technology to most of the
world or to protect its intellectual property.
3. Do not disclose personal information about other individuals.
5. Do not discuss work-related legal proceedings or controversies, including
communications with Sun attorneys.
6. Always refer to Sun's trademarked names properly. For example, never use a
trademark as a noun, since this could result in a loss of our trademark rights.
7. Do not post others' material, for example photographs, articles, or music, without
ensuring they've granted appropriate permission to do this. Y

Literature on such guidelines includes 'Untangling The World Wide Weblog: A Proposal
For Blogging, Employment-At-Will, And Lifestyle Discrimination Statutes' by Shelbie
Byers in 42 2  

 !
)$!  (2007) 245-91, 'You Got Fired On Your
Day Off?: Challenging Terminatio n of Employees for Personal Blogging Practices' by
Aaron Kirkland in 75 8$!  (2006) 545-568. Other pointers are here.

  

Print publishers and conference organi sers have arguably made more money from books
about blogging than actual bloggers. Primers for corporate bloggers abound; most are
distinguished by chutzpah and enthusiasm rather than insight.

They include 
 




! ) 
#
8
)
ë
 

  (New York: Kaplan 2006) by Shel Holtz & Ted Demopoulos, 


 


%A*

 )! ) 
#
8

'  (New York: Portfolio
2006) by Debbie Weil, *


 
 

 


(Indianapolis:
New Riders 2006) by DL Byron & Steve Broback, ë  








  (New York: Butterworth Heinemann 2007) by John Cass and 
 
 & (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass 2007) by Brian Bailey & Terry Storch. Y




# 


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

Most search engines do not visit every site each day (the 'latency' for major engines
ranges from three weeks to nine months), do not 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 on a 'real tim e' basis.

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 engines and directories are also appearing. The quality of citations
on those engines is uneven. They include -Y

Y Technorati - claiming to watch 15,101 blogs and biased towards the digerati Y

Y Blogfinder - a category-based directory and engineY

Y Tpoowl - like the "Weblog Madness list of lists" has not been updated since 2000
but of interest as a snapshot Y

Y Blogs - "The Busy Person's Guide to Blogs", complete with a "Spellbinding Sites
and Sources" page Y

Y Blogger Directory - a directory of member sites searchable by date, name and
keywordY

Y Blogstreet - clusters similar blogs into a "neighbourhood" Y

Y Eatonweb - a portal of around 7,000 blogs accessible by name, country, subject
and keywordYY

Y Daypop - a "current events search engine" covering around 7,500 news sites,
with a 'Top 40' blog list Y

Y Weblogs.com - features a 'Top 100' links list. YY

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."

Blogdex boasts that it Y

focuses on the referential information provided by weblogs, or the links that people place
on their sites. By amalgamating these pointers, we can get an instantaneous look at
internet fashion from democratic means. Y

Another list of the "top weblogs" is the Technorati Top 100 ranking. Other pointers to
blog statistics are here.

Notions of 'blog overload' have spawned blog digest services such as Kinja, which
automatically provides subscribers with short excerpts from the latest posts to
nominated blogs. Other services, such as Feedster, mimic more traditional online news
feeds.

Feedster claims to monitor around 0.5 million feeds and blogs on a daily basis.

A note on arrangements in some nations for identifying a blog through an International

Standard Serial Number (ISSN), the journal equivalent of an ISBN, is here. The
Australian National Library's ISSN page is here. 

 ' 
 

The notion of blogs as samizdat or a photojournalism with the zeal of the investigative
reporter but without the inhibitions of a 'big media' corporate lawyers means that video
blogging and photoblogs are likely to pose concerns regarding privacy.

Business writer Bob Parks fretted about moblogs as an online corporate lynching,
offsetting hype that camera-equipped mobile phones and wireless blogs will only ever be
used against the dark side (real-time publishing photos of nasties in uniform beating up
brave anti-globalisation protestors or opponents of the PLA).

From a policing perspective blogs are not located in a legal vacuum. In 2005 for example
Blake Ranking, who had caused a fatal car crash, pleaded guilty to manslaughter after
prosecutors in the US discovered a confession on his blog (aptly located at blurty.com).
He had previously told investigators he remembered nothing of the crash and little of its
aftermath.

 

There have been no comprehensive studies regarding the accessibility of blogs, ie

whether most blogs can be readily navigated and parsed by readers with visual or other
disabilities. Small-scale testing of major blogs and blog tools suggests that most blogs
are in fact quite unfriendly, failing to meet WAI standards.

That failure reflects the technology used in some blogging services. More broadly it may
reflect the market for those services, essentially authors who want to publish online with
a minimum of effort and indeed may not be aware of concerns about online accessibility
or consider that it is important.

The UK has seen some initiatives in the development of bloggin g software that is
specifically intended for the blind: a laudable initiative, since the joys of writing/reading
a blog should not be restricted to the sighted. It is unclear however whether there is
significant uptake of the software outside the UK.

 '# #

In discussing archival aspects of electronic publishing (and myths that "everything is

online" - and will be accessible in the future) we have noted the ephemeral nature of
much online content. Ongoing access to many blogs is unlikely.

Some authors have already complained that they have lost non-current entries - or
whole blogs - through technical failures or the collapse of the entity responsible for
hosting the blog. That is reminiscent of problems encountered by many owners of
personal sites that went offline towards the end of the dot-com bubble when an ISP or
'online community' host went out of business or simply slashed free hosting as part of
cost cutting. Few bloggers appear to be consistently archiving their content and
institutional archiving has favoured celebrities (particularly those with academic tenure)
rather than less prominent authors.

For some bloggers a concern is likely to be that their words will indeed be too accessible.
The caching of blogs by search engines, cannibalisation of text by other bloggers and
copying by 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. As with postings to newsgroups, old words wi ll haunt some writers - particularly
given the emphasis on spontaneity and intimacy noted on preceding pages of this
profile.

What happens when a blogger expires? Some people make specific arrangements for
their executors to delete or preserve the blog, sometimes as a form of cyber-memorial.
Others leave handling of their blog and email to fate. That has proved problematical,
with some hosts proving indifferent to claims by a blogger's estate. In pr actice some
blogs have gone offline only because the estate stopped paying the bills.



Many blogs allow readers to publish comments on particular entries, potentially offering
the dialogue that is evident in some wiki editorial entries. There are no definitive
statistics; the 2006 Pew Internet & American Life Project estimate that 87% of US
bloggers allow comments on their blog is contentious.

That feature has however increasingly been abused by spammers, with the emergence
of 'comment spam'. Typically it includes a hyperlink to the spammer's site - offering
'unbeatable deals' on chemicals to enhance your anatomy, opportunities to make money
without effort or risk, or access to adult content.

Some comment spam is added manually. Publication of other comment spam reflects
weaknesses in blog software and hosting services, which enable automated identification
and submission of comments. Services such as Movable Type have sought to reduce
comment spam by enhancing the software and by establishing blacklists or whitelists to
exclude content from particular addresses.

As with bulk unsolicited commercial email (the spam with which most people are
regrettably familiar) there is no simple solution and the battle betwee n unscrupulous
marketers and blog owners is likely to be ongoing.


&& 

The #
% 

tartly compared much reader feedback on blogs to drive-by
shootings. It is thus unsurprising that bloggers have used pseudonyms or anonymity in
providing supposedly independent comments on their own blogs. The extent of that
practice - dubbed sock puppetry - is unclear, although 'hunt the sock puppet' has
become a minor blood sport in the blogosphere.

Ethics aside (proponents argue that being a sock puppet is mere self-defence or savvy
marketing, in the tradition of figures such as Walter Scott, Gerhart Hauptmann and Walt
Whitman), puppetry can provoke a visceral response. That is particularly the case if the
puppet is vilifying enemies or waxing lyrical about the author.

In 2006, for example cultural critic Lee Siegel of #* & was humilatingly
exposed as contributing comments - under the pseudonym Sprezzatura - to his own
blog. Sprezzatura modestly characterised Siegel "brilliant" and "brave", recurrently
rubbishing detractors (eg "an awful suck-up" whose writing "is sweaty with panting
obsequious ambition" or as a "bunch of immature, abusive sheep" engaged in
'blogfascism') who had unaccountably failed to appreciate the sock-master's wit and
wisdom.

Siegel's blog was shuttered after exposure; he explained that Y

I wildly created an over-the-top persona and adopted the tone of my attackers, when I
should have just gone to the gym instead Y

and subsequently commented Y

putting a polemicist like myself in the blogosphere is like putting someone with an
obesity problem in a chocolate factory. Y

Sniping against the blogfascisti continued in his A 

&   
A
 &
 &
* (New York: Random 2008).

Other self-boosters include Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Hiltzik, John Rechy and
neoconservative John Lott Jr. (active as Mary Rosh for over three years).

Blogs are also a venue for stalking, cyberbullying and harassment.

High profile blogger Cathy Sierra for example lamented in April 2007 that Y

As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech

conference. But I'm not. I'm at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four
weeks, I've been getting death th reat comments on this blog. But that's not what
pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and
sex posted on two other blogs ... blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes
prominent bloggers. ... someone posted personal data mixed with inaccurate
information. It is the only comment I have removed from this thread. I wish to thank
everyone for their support, but honestly --the high visibility and coverage of this one post
has led to more trouble for me. Now, even people who had never heard of me are
expressing hatred and creating new problems (posting my social security number and
address, horrific lies about me, etc). ...

It started with death threat blog comments left here. We all have trolls - but until four
weeks ago, none of mine had threatened death. (The law is clear - to encourage or
suggest someone's death is just as illegal as claiming you intend to do it yourself). At
about the same time, a group of bloggers ... began participating on a (recently p ulled)
blog called meankids.org. At first, it was the usual stuff -lots of slamming of people like
Tara Hunt, Hugh MacLeod, Maryam Scoble, and myself. Nothing new. No big deal.
Nothing they hadn't done on their own blogs many times before. But when it was my
turn, somebody crossed a line. They posted a photo of a noose next to my head, and
one of their members (posting as "Joey") commented "the only thing Kathy has to offer
me is that noose in her neck size." Y

In an interview, she dismissed the argument that cyberbullying is so common that she
should overlook it: Y

I can't believe how many people are saying to me, 'Get a life, this is the Internet'. If
that's the case, how will we ever recognize a real threat? Y

One of the alleged harassers later indicated that he was a victim of identity theft.

 
 
#

 

Given hype about the blogosphere and the necessary death of 'old media' it is
unsurprising that 2005 saw claims in the US thatY

Y bloggers deserved the same protection as journalists (a protection misunderstood
by many enthusiasts)Y

Y bloggers - apparently any and all - were indeed journalists. Y

Scott Rosenberg commented that Y

A blogger is someone who uses a certain kind of tool to publish a certain kind of Web
site. The label tells us nothing about how the tool is used or what is published. We went
through this discussion a decade ago, when people first started asking whether W eb
sites were journalism. To understand this, just take the question, "Are bloggers
journalists?" and reframe it in terms of previous generations of tools. "Are telephone
callers journalists?" "Are typewriter users journalists?" "Are mimeograph operators
journalists?" Or, most simply, "Are writers journalists?" Well, duh, sometimes! But
sometimes not.
That is the only answer to the "Are bloggers journalists?" question that makes any
sense. ... This answer is inconvenient, as we face the question of whether bloggers
should receive the same legal protection as more conventionally defined journalists; it
doesn't provide a clearcut legal rule. But, let's face it, legal protections for journalists
have always involved a certain fuzziness. ...
You can try to define journalists by applying the filter of professionalism, by seeing
whether people are actually earning a living through their journalistic work - but then
you rule out the vast population of low -paid or non-paid freelance workers, and those
who are not currently making money in their writing but hope to someday. Apparently
most of the existing shield l aws use some version of the "you are where your paycheck
comes from" definition of journalist (see Declan McCullagh over at CNET for more).
That's one good reason for thinking that they might need some revision.

There's a good definition of "journalist" sitting right at the top of Jim Romenesko's
journalism blog today (is pioneering blogger Romenesko a journalist?), where CNN/US
president Jonathan Klein says: "I define a journalist as someone who asks questions,
finds out answers and communicates them to an audience." By that standard, a hefty
proportion of today's bloggers qualify. Y

We question whether merely asking questions and communicating answers = journalism.

That definition is so broad as to encompass your school teacher, many clerics and the
bozo in your local bar, along with Joseph Roth, Ed Murrow, Paul Einzig and Martha
Gellhorn. Y