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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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The End of Print?
Wednesday 31 January @ 16:57:39 |
 by MAX SPARBER
With two new blogs created every second, how long until the blogosphere begins to take over what once was the province of mainstream newspapers?
 Sometimes it is hard to believe that there were no blogs before 1999. This is not to say there were no online diaries—the essential format of the blog has been around since at least 1994, when a student at Swarthmore College by the name of Justin Hall began posting daily diary entries online and continued for 12 years.
But the portmanteau word "weblog" didn't come into existence until John Barger coined it to describe his regular posting on his site Robot Wisdom in 1997, and it was another two years before another weblogger, Peter Merholz of Peterme, truncated the word into "blog." At that time, if you wanted to post regular entries to a web page, you had to have a working knowledge of internet markup languages such as HTML, and consequently the world of blogging was relatively small. A year later, the online site Xanga added a blog feature, soon followed by sites such as Diaryland, Movable Type and Blogger, which featured pre-made templates that simplified the process of creating a blog, and the number of blogs exploded.
That's the past, and, as Shakespeare said, what's past is prelude. We now find ourselves in the middle of the largest mass publishing experiment in history. David Sifry, who created the website Technorati, which tracks blogs, publishes a "State of the Blogosphere" report every few months, and here are the startling details of his most recent report, from August of 2006:
• As of July of last year, there were 50 million blogs.
• The blogosphere doubles in size about every six months.
• The blogosphere is now 100 times bigger than it was just three years ago
• About two new blogs are created every second of every day.
This is an awful lot of text being put online. By comparison, let us look at the last great amateur publishing explosion, the so-called "Zine Revolution" of the 1990s, engendered by easy access to inexpensive photocopy machines and a sophisticated network that shared self-published chapbooks and magazines through mail. The New York Times estimated that 20,000 zines were being created and shared in 1993. If yesterday was a typical day, 175,000 new blogs were created.
Of course, much of what falls under the rubric of "blog" is crap. A sizable percentage of new blogs are "splogs," or spam blogs. These blogs are generated automatically, abusing loopholes in free blog services, and exist only to act as a sort of commercial for a product (generally the same sort of stuff that you'll find in e-mail spam, such as sexual potency pills and adult websites), but masquerade as ordinary blogs. Many legitimate blogs do little but recycle the contents found on other sites, giving the blogosphere its well-earned reputation as being an echo chamber. This is particularly notable on political blogs, where the same half-dozen posts will quickly get republished on every like-minded political blog within hours.
Locally generated political blogs are generally highly partisan, such as Power Line and Minnesota Democrats Exposed on the right and Dump Michelle Bachmann and MnPact on the left. Both feature an awful lot of commentary, but little new reportage, and what there is doesn't go through the typical vetting process of traditional journalism, and so lack the authority that comes with diligent fact checking. Blogs are still primarily a medium for opinion and entertainment, and haven't proven to be especially good at breaking new stories. There are a few local news blogs, but they exist primarily as useful aggregators of stories that appeared elsewhere, such as the left-leaning New Patriot and Minneapolis Issues Forum and the right-leaning Captain's Quarters. This is understandable, as reporting is a time-consuming and sometimes expensive undertaking, and bloggers are generally interested hobbyists.
Blogs are just now starting to make money through ad sales; one expects that as more money becomes available to bloggers, they will have more time and resources to devote to actual reporting. One of the most exciting developments in this direction has been a growth in community themed blogging: blogs that look at news and events for a specific geographical region. Two notable local examples are Metroblogging Minneapolis and MnSpeak, both of which I have contributed to. MnSpeak, in particular, has managed to couple general discussions about the Twin Cities with fast-breaking stories and new reporting, perhaps assisted by the fact that many of its contributors are members of larger local newspapers. This may point to a future direction for blogs, particularly locally. After all, the local printed media is going through a massive transition at the moment, and it's the perfect opportunity for the development of local blogs that fill in the gaps of mainstream print media, from news stories that aren't being covered to cultural events that are given scant attention. In the time it took to write this story, about 14,000 new blogs were created; who knows what might develop in the next few years? ||
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