Weblogging-what's it all about? A bunch of losers prattling on about what they had for breakfast and pretending they found links that Memepool unearthed eons ago? Or the new hope, coming up rom the grassroots, for a Web counterculture that's finding itself increasingly drowned out by large corporations? By Kim Gilmour, July 2002.
People have always had a need to express themselves, but it's often the same old voices that shout the loudest--particularly on the Internet, where commercialism is becoming rampant and big media corporations are taking over.
But now ordinary people are fighting against the tide of corporate information. Weblogs, or 'blogs' for short, are one of the ways they're doing it. At their most basic, blogs are regularly updated, online journals containing a series of annotated links to timely events or topics. But they often run deeper than that. Webloggers can provide alternative voices to the big media outlets, many of which can't, or won't, paint the whole picture of a particular event or concern.
Today, weblogs are more popular than ever, and anyone from a political journalist to a bird-watcher can set one up. But just five years ago, most blogs were by geeks who cumbersomely handcoded their pages and tended to link to arcane technical sites or IT news. But free or inexpensive weblog software and services, such as Blogger (www.blogger.com), Pitas (www.pltas.com), Radio UserLand (http://radio.userland.com), Moveable Type (www.moveabletype.org) and Big Blog Tool (www.bigblogtool.com) are now making it much easier for people to become spontaneous self-publishers. With these tools you can let more than one person post to your blog, and enable visitors to comment on posts.
You might think most of this blogging chit-chat is driven by self-indulgence--a modern version of the humble yet cringeworthy home page, perhaps--and you'd be half right. But that doesn't make all blogs bad. The fact that weblogs are usually self-edited, personal responses to particular events or topics can make them very powerful.
And media outlets are taking notice. While some might feel threatened by webloggers, many see the opportunities blogs represent. Evan Williams, CEO and president of Pyra Labs, which is behind the popular Blogger service, says: "The format makes sense as a complement for other types of media content. Weblogs have become popular because they take advantage of some of the unique characteristics of the Web--the immediacy as well as the brevity, which a lot of people prefer. And it gives a context for doing a different type of journalism that doesn't just imitate what the media's done before."
For this reason, Guardian Unlimited (www.guardian.co.uk) has embraced weblogs like no other media outlet. Simon Waldman, director of digital publishing at Guardian Online, says: "If the Internet was like inventing printing, then the birth of the weblog is like inventing magazines. They cover so many areas. One minute you'll see techies discussing the finer points of XML, the next you'll see people discussing a school of politics."
Guardian Unlimited has been running its own weblog for around 18 months (www.guardian.co.uk/weblog). "We're going to engage with this quite fully," Waldman says. "We're looking at a number of ways to expand the role and presence of blogs on the site, and we're thinking a bit more intelligently about linking with the blogging community."
Linking up
Links are essential parts of weblogs, but if you look at weblog monitors such as Blogdex (http://blogdex.media.mit.edu) and DayPop (www.daypop.com), many tend to point to the same media sources and stories each day. How can that be unique? "Your collection of links becomes like a meta-resource," says Waldman. "Choosing what to link to is an editorial statement in itself--just as how you edit a magazine. The overall editing is as important as the individual pieces therein."
Links are what blogs are all about, says Steve Bowbrick, founder of Web-based email company Another.com. He believes they bring a much-needed 'connectedness' to the Web, particularly between weblogs with similar outlooks. "The connectedness is fundamental to the whole concept, but easy to miss. Weblogs are, by definition, better connected than home pages. The blog becomes successful by virtue of having lots of inbound links. You get lots of inbound links by providing lots of outbound links. It's the network effect in action."
Linking creates a 'wildfire effect', as weblogs are often updated at least once a day, he says.
Helping Google (usually)
Blogs can help the search engine Google's algorithms. Google looks at the hypertext used to link to the sites, which means the most frequently linked to articles rise to the top of its rankings. So some fun-filled bloggers with too much time on their hands have taken advantage of Google's methods by getting dozens of their peers to link to their blogs with a key phrase (which might be humorous, but might not have anything to do with the link itself). Blogger Adam Mathes coined the phrase 'Google bombing' to describe this When, as an experiment, he got people to link to his friend Andy Pressman's blog with the words 'talentless hack'. For months (until the media picked up on the story), a Google search on the phrase 'talentless hack' came up with Andy's blog at number one every time.
But these jokers are in the minority, says Evan Williams. "On one hand it's almost amazing how much influence certain weblogs, if they get a lot of links in, can have over what shows up in Google for millions of people. It seems a little bit imbalanced, yet Google seems to be improving and [overall] it helps their algorithms to have these links, so they don't seem to mind."
Variety and vanity
Blogs come in all shapes and sizes. In the US, some post 11 September weblogs have been dubbed 'warblogs'--right-of-centre weblogs seeking to address the perceived liberal bias in the media (www.andrewsullivan.com). Old-school bloggers such as Web designer Jason Kottke (www.kottke.org) long for the early days when 'everyone' had a worthwhile opinion, while cult sites such as www.blackbeltjones.com describe the act of 'warchalking', a type of graffiti that tells Net nerds how to find hidden high speed wireless networks. Then there are the London bloggers who map their locations on a tube map (www.londonbloggers.co.uk), and the people who fill in 'revealing' quizzes about what type of Jim Henson Muppet they are, or what rock star they most resemble, and post up the results (http://fluffymuppet.blogspot.com). See the boxout on page 52 for our essential blogs.
Naturally, there's a lot of silt covering the gold. Waldman defends bloggers who consider themselves 'amateur journalists'. "If you're a journalist, you're not genetically superior at writing to anyone else on the planet," he argues. "There's no reason why someone who's not by nature of training or employment a journalist can't have valid views, or write well, or have a worthwhile opinion."
But shouldn't there be at least an indication of the blogger's agenda on the site, or a code of ethics? "That's a bit idealist," says Waldman (whose own blog is at www.waldo.net). "The Web is like the Wild West in terms of people's opinions, It's an issue inherent to the medium. It becomes quite interesting when you look at things like weblogs devoted to the Middle East, because there's an ongoing story there where both sides are guilty of distorting the truth, and how it gets covered in weblogs is quite intriguing."
Rob Taylor, founder of blog annotation service Enetation (www.enetation.co.uk), agrees. "During news of the troubles in the Middle East, it's been refreshing to read direct opinions and reports from those who are there via their blogs, rather than the often 'spun' traditional news channels. Media groups may see their authority undermined by conflicting reports."
Evan Williams says blogs and journalism go together. "All the stuff about weblogs versus traditional journalism, as if it's some war that they're fighting, is obviously silly because they're complementary. [Silicon Valley reporter] Dan Gillmor has written stuff about the role of weblogs. His statement is, 'My readers know more than I do.' And that's a good thing. The idea is that anybody can write about what's going on in front of them--and there's always someone on the inside who knows something before a journalist does."
But finding good blogs among the many cliques and vanity-sites that exist op the Internet can be tricky. There are many weblogs out there which detail the self-indulgent, mundane aspect of peoples' angst-ridden lives that most of us couldn't care less about. Isn't it all one big ego-trip?
"I think there's an element of that," says Williams (whose own blog is at www.evhead.com). "And it's not a small element. But there's everything out there you can imagine. In the past there were a lot of complaints about the quality of the blogs and the topics--that they're inane, that they're all by high schoolers. Clearly, if[a weblog] is that easy to do, you're going to get all types of stuff. Some of it's for ego, while some of it's more and more professional, and that's exciting."
But although weblogs might 'democratise' the Internet and provide alternative opinion to big media sources, they can seem like a big popularity contest. Many bloggers link to other people's blogs in their sidebars, which tends to create a rather closed hive of sites.
What's next?
There's no straightforward way of sifting through blog content, apart from following people's links to others' weblogs, or going to sites like Blogdex to see the most-linked to sites each day. It can be a hit and miss affair.
"There's a big problem right now in finding out what's out there in the weblog world in general," admits Williams. "Especially for people new to the world of weblogs."
This is one thing Taylor would change about blog culture. "Currently it's all too cliquey with a lot of interesting writings still hidden from normal Web users' paths... [we should be] promoting the quality and hiding away the dross."
Williams is exploring how to better categorise the weblogs on Blogger so it's not just the most popular links and blogs that get the attention. Based on journalist Steven Johnson's ideas, Williams is planning ways to have weblog content come to you, perhaps in syndicated form.
"We want to put less emphasis on the time factor and more emphasis on the topic," he says. "We're going to rebuild our blog directory and possibly restore some search features we had way in the beginning but couldn't keep up as things grew. We'll show more of the links between people's blogs and help them discover the interesting stuff out there based on all kinds of preferences and topics."
Waldman says blogs are a "democratic school of publishing" and media companies have to decide what they're going to do about the medium. During the World Cup, for instance, The Guardian used real-time blogs to outline every development and display emails from readers, while the BBC website includes a 'newslog' by journalist Nick Robinson that comments on political life.
But whatever happens to weblogs and weblog software, it's generally agreed this is what the Web's been waiting for. Maybe weblogs' popularity will die down in a few years and they'll become, as Bowbrick says, "a part of the ecology". But for now, they're affecting how the media exists on the Web.
Of all the weblog publishing tools, Waldman prefers Blogger. "Blogger is truly smart," he says. "Just when you're feeling really tired of the Internet, something like this comes around and it becomes really exciting again."
Williams says Blogger has more than 636,000 registered users. He still operates it from his apartment in San Francisco with half a dozen other people. Most users prefer the free version, but a premium version is funding new development.
"It's fun to be a part of," he says. "The dotcom boom a couple of years ago was exciting, but in a different way. Despite all that collapsing, and despite being here in San Francisco, everything is more fun and more exciting now because the BS factor has gone away. It's not just about getting rich--it's about communicating, and changing media."
Weblogs in general have also inspired Bowbrick. "It's where the energy is. We've all been looking for that after the last couple of years carrying sacks of cement around on our shoulders. We've all been looking for that new vibrancy, which has come from a grassroots level. That's where it was always going to come from."
Posted by kimgilmour at April 23, 2004 10:44 AM