Bogged Down in Blogs

Digital Journal — Imagine a pitch-dark bedroom somewhere in suburbia, with furnishings and decorations as distraught as its absent inmate. It is chaotically strewn with rumpled clothes, armbands, teen magazines and Avril Lavigne paraphernalia. Suddenly, a gaunt figure thunders into the room and plunks down on a desk chair. Tears of rage begin to swell in her eyes, which glow in the reflection of her monitor — now the only light source in the room. She furiously pecks at her keyboard and unleashes her heart’s confession, a tale of dejection and woe.

“SO mad!” she writes. “My stupid Mazda is Dead again!! been in the shop for 3 days… but the mechanics dunno what the diagnosis is! Damn those dumb *bleep* rip-off mechanics! DAMN THEM TO HELL!! Well now my daddy rented a Hyundai for me to drive for now. *sigh* cheap *bleep* car.. no power what so ever!”

Welcome to the histrionic world of weblogging.

In December 1997, Jorn Barger started up a website called “Robot Wisdom.” There wasn’t much to it, just a plain, text-driven page featuring regularly updated links to news stories with occasional commentary. Sites like these had been around for several years, but Barger’s had one distinction: It was the first to call itself a “weblog.”

Six years later, weblogs, or “blogs,” number in the millions and have revolutionized the way we look at communications. Blogs have sprung up to cover nearly every possible topic, each swarming with thousands of viewpoints. They’ve hatched a spreading online culture (or perhaps cult), alternately launched and destroyed careers, attracted the attention of businesses and governments worldwide and very likely changed the course of politics and the media for good. You’re probably familiar with the concept of blogs by now and perhaps have encountered a few, but don’t regularly read them. That’s certainly forgivable.

Bloggers, and others residing within the blogosphere, have been lamenting the decline of blog quality since the trend exploded in the summer of 1999. The majority of blogs up to that point were highly edited and timely sites, linking obscure or interesting stories accompanied by witty, irreverent commentary. But new Web-based software tools launched by Pitas, Blogger and Groksoup made it simple for anybody to start one. Soon there were thousands, often taking the format of a public diary: Self-referential, stream-of-semi-consciousness, slang-riddled stories of how so-and-so’s day went, frequently with trendy, self-diminishing use of the lower case, “innovative” spelling and capitalization, stomach-churning page design and unnerving hypertext temper tantrums.

But things changed once again, as they were in the habit of doing after 9/11. Soon after the World Trade Center was struck, throngs of people inundated online media sites seeking updates, causing servers to crash under the weight of all the traffic. However, several New York City blogs offering first- or second-hand accounts of the attacks began getting far more hits than usual because they could supplement, update or simply recycle stories generated by the mass media.

Blogs, for better or for worse, have gained more legitimacy since then. Along with ubiquitous, often damning critiques of George W. Bush’s adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, the blogging community is partly credited with the recent media assassinations of such characters as retired Republican leader Trent Lott and similarly unemployed New York Times editor Howell Raines. Whereas mainstream media would have soon forgotten these stories in the wake of something sexier, bloggers diligently resuscitated the issue until justice — or at least some conception thereof — was realized.

As popular as blogging may seem (no authoritative statistics exist, but there’s assumed to be about a million active blogs and twice as many inactive ones), they’re a relatively minor blip on Internet radar. When you consider that Google indexes more than three billion sites on any given day, the number of bloggers and their readership is, as Pew Research put it, “statistically insignificant.” Not surprisingly, this brush-off stirred up much indignation in the blogging community, who reminded each other that even four per cent of surfers looking blogwards for news is a huge accomplishment. Blogging’s influence and presence on the Web is actually uncanny.

What is it about blogs that makes them pop up so consistently at the top of search engine requests, no matter what the topic? That’s a question that puzzled Google’s technicians, until they announced last May their intention to help mitigate the collective uproar created by millions of blog pages. Google created the “Groups” tab shortly after acquiring Deja’s newsgroup service, which filters Usenet posts from the main index. The announcement to fix the blog problem — likely caused by extensive and incestuous hyperlinking within the weblogging community, not to mention the frequency in which these amaranthine archives of text are indexed — quickly followed Google’s acquisition of Blogger, the popular weblog authoring software and hosting service. Potentially, this would not only serve the blogophobes, frustrated by the apparent dearth of reputable information on the Web, but it could also help enthusiasts to wade through the ever-swelling weblog pool.

Until Google accomplishes this, however, there are already a few ways to navigate the blogosphere. Centralized news aggregators like Daypop, Technorati, and MIT’s Blogdex use spider applications to index popular weblogs, track hyperlinks and check for updates. Some, like Blogdex, use search algorithms similar to Google’s, ranking individual entries according to how frequently bloggers link to them. This is meant to give a snapshot of what people are talking about. In this system, righteous attacks on the Recording Industry Association of America, wartime paranoia, celebrity gossip, “news of the wacky” and the latest anime-parodying Flash games are all treated with equal importance.

Then you have the personal RSS aggregators, programs like Amphetadesk or Syndirella, which automatically update you whenever a website posts new content. RSS, an XML dialect that either stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, is often incorporated into weblogs to make them more widely reproducible. It’s a bit like the short-lived “push” technology of the late ‘90s, in that they can automatically dump content onto your desktop. But so far, RSS readers are less bloated and more customizable than the once-popular PointCast news streamer.

These services, combined with emerging trends like mobile blogging (“moblogging”) and the increased use of multimedia in blogs, have created the potential for a sort of electronic meta-consciousness to arise. As thoughts are transmitted freely and instantly between individuals, a phenomenon almost like telepathy begins to take shape. Some have compared it to the collective hive-mind arrangement of the “Borg,” a fictional race of cyber-netic drones who used to give the USS Enterprise a hard time.

John Hiler, a reporter working the oft-spurned blog beat, advanced this notion with an essay entitled “We are the Blogs. Journalism will be Assimilated.” The blogging collective, he says, always manages to unleash breaking stories and discuss its issues to death, before the traditional media can even get it printed. Whether they’re accurate, objective, snappily written — that’s another story.

“The quality of a blog itself is questionable compared to traditional journalism,” says Robin Ward, a computer programmer and Toronto weblogger. “There are bloggers out there who really edit things and produce well-written stuff, but for the most part, it’s
a thought dump; hit ‘send’ and it’s out there for the world to see.”

Ward says blogs are akin to emails: Sloppily written, but they get to the point. He took up blogging about two years ago, mostly because he was already prone to recapping weekends to friends through email, or sharing interesting links. He never kept a journal before that, and he certainly had no aspirations to be a journalist, unlike many bloggers. But in some cases, they’re arguably one and the same.

Several newspapers incorporate blogging elements into their online entities, such as The Guardian and the San Jose Mercury News. And then there are some journalists, typically casualties of the tech-sector massacre, who have managed to earn a living by starting independent news weblogs. The former editor of Silicon Alley Reporter, Rafat Ali, said he was slated to pull in between $60,000 and $80,000 (US) in advertising and sponsorship last year, through his self-published online newsletter PaidContent.

While getting paid to blog is a relatively novel idea, there are other ways of making it at least self-sufficient. Some cover their hosting costs by becoming Amazon affiliates and making a few bucks in clickthrough commission, and others sell merchandise like T-shirts and coffee mugs. Some claim to make pretty decent coin through voluntary reader handouts, whereas others — the so-called “blogwhores” — compose wish lists, appealing for gifts like DVDs, cameras and puppies, which are occasionally gratified. Owning a webcam (and perhaps a belly button ring) usually helps drive donations.

Rebecca Blood, a San Francisco writer/blogger, also has a wish list, except hers asks readers to donate to various worthy causes. Blood is an old-school blogger — at it since 1999 — and her prowess attracted enough attention to land a book deal. In autumn 2001, Perseus Publishing asked her to write The Weblog Handbook, and it was released two years later to much acclaim.

While Blood concedes that most weblogs seem to be written by whiny, self-absorbed teenage girls (a recent Polish study actually substantiated this), she argues that there’s also plenty of great writing to be found.

“There are so many talented writers out there, it’s astonishing to me,” she says. “These are people with no training, but they learn to do it well and they have something to say — individuals who don’t have a media presence anyplace else.”

Blogging is also a great way for people to expand their social circles, Blood says. These days, bloggers don’t just link up to each other virtually; they meet in the real world and create instant, intimate communities.

But Blood has a good reason to believe in the fellowship of the blog: As it turns out, the first person who ever linked to her site “back in the day” eventually became her husband.