The Blog Phenomenon

From humble beginnings, blogs have become one of the most significant forms of Internet media. Angus Kidman explains how blogging originated and looks at how these online diaries are changing the shape of the Internet.

Ever since the World Wide Web became popular in around 1995, people have been using Web pages to record their thoughts and impressions, and to provide links to pages that they find useful, interesting or amusing. One obvious form for doing this is in a diary-style listing, with the most recent entries at the top.

Around 1997, an online diarist called Jorn Barger coined the term ‘web log’ for this kind of site, and this quickly became shortened to ‘blog’. That term soon produced dervatives: blogging is the activity of maintaining a blog, while a blogger is someone who writes or contributes to one. Whatever name you choose, blogging has become one of the most popular activities online in recent years and popular blogs can attract millions of readers.

Arguments rage over exactly what a blog is, but most observers agree on two essential features: blogs use a reverse chronological list of entries and heavily feature links to other sites. Blogs normally achieve some sort of unity either by being produced by a single individual (who can then comment on anything that takes their fancy) or by covering a single subject (whether that’s Japanese anime or the workings of the London Underground). Particularly popular topics for blogs include technology, politics and blogging itself, but literally anything is fair game.

The popularity of blogs is largely due to the fact that they reflect the real-time and interconnected nature of the Internet itself. While traditional news sources require journalists to research and write a story, editors to check it and then technology experts to place it online, bloggers can respond to events or developments as soon as they happen. (Of course, accuracy may suffer at the expense of speed in this scenario.)

Another reason why blogs have become steadily more influential is the rise of Google as the world’s most popular search engine. One of the criteria that Google uses when ranking search results is how many other pages link to a particular site, and blogs provide a wider sampling of this phenomenon than commercial sites. This kind of ranking has become a critical feature of the blog community, with a number of sites (such as Blogdex and Technorati) providing real-time rankings of which blogs are linked to most often. (Google also owns Blogger, one of the more popular blog hosting sites.)

There are now hundreds of thousands of blogs in existence. The most obscure may only be read by their creator; the most popular can exercise real power and influence and break news stories that might otherwise have been entirely ignored by mainstream media.

Some blogs, such as Call Centre Confidential (callcentrediary.blogspot.com), are designed to give an insider view of a particular occupation from a single point of view. Others cover news from a wide variety of sources, such as the infamous site run by Matt Drudge (www.mattdrudge.com), which played a major role in exposing Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinksy.

Some blogs come about largely because of the fame of the writer. A notable example of this is the blog maintained by former Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Wil Wheaton (www.wilwheaton.net), who has even written a book about his blogging exploits. At the other extreme, some blog maintainers become famous simply by producing an interesting or controversial blog.

The hows and whys

Why do people keep blogs? While a handful of blogs have audiences large enough to attract advertising and thus form a paying job, most people keep blogs for similar reasons to keeping diaries: they enjoy having a record of things they’ve done or thought. Others like to share their expertise on a particular topic with a wider audience, or hope to influence events (a common motive for political blogs). Some blogs can be used within a particular community (such as a school or workplace) as an informal way of information sharing and team building.

As blogging has become more popular, some people are even required to maintain a blog as part of their job. Microsoft, for instance, actively encourages its staff to post blogs about their current projects (partly to overcome perceptions that the company is secretive and controlling).

Starting your own blog is fairly straightforward. There are many sites that host blogs for free, and many more that charge a small monthly fee to host your blog. A good blog hosting site will allow you to enter text from any Internet-connected computer and will post it automatically, eliminating the need to know specialised page and image formatting commands. Effectively, if your PC can connect to the Internet, you can use it to maintain a blog.

While blog hosting services are useful, they aren’t essential. If you wanted to save money and are comfortable with creating your own HTML page, you could create a blog using the free hosting space provided with most dialup and broadband accounts.

Given the continued growth of blogs, it’s arguably more important to consider the topic and scope of your content rather than the way you’re going to put it online. Before committing energy (and money) to setting up a blog, spend some time searching out what already exists online. If 50 other people are also covering the same topic (and you don’t find yourself rampantly disagreeing with all of them), then the odds are you won’t attract many readers.

If you simply want to keep a diary of major events in your life, then this may not be a major consideration. In that case, issues of privacy are perhaps more relevant. How will you feel if members of your family read your blog? Bear in mind also that with many search engines keeping caches of Web content, deleting a controversial blog entry won’t necessarily mean that it has disappeared for good.