The Impact of Blogging

The Impact of Blogging

by Robbie Allen, December 20, 2005

In a short span of five years, blogs have invaded our culture and left an indelible mark on society. From Politics to Journalism, blogs are reshaping our notion of how content is created and information is disseminated.

In 2002, I created a personal website (rallenhome.com) to host supplemental information for books I was writing for O’Reilly Media. My site’s front page was just a list of short status updates I’d make from time to time about whatever I was working on. A year after I started the site, some colleagues began referring to it as my “blog”. To me, it was just a website I updated periodically.

This raises an interesting question about what constitutes a blog. In simple terms, a blog is just an online journal of sorts. Some are broadly focused and act as an online version of a diary covering all aspects of a person’s daily life, while others are narrower and focus on a specific topic area. Blogs began proliferating in the early 2000s due to the advent of blogging software such as Blogger, Wordpress, and Moveable Type. Instead of editing HTML directly as I did with my site, you can use these tools to easily create blog entries via the web, your mobile phone, and even email.

The term “blog” was coined in 1998 as a derivation of “weblog”, but online journals have been around since the early days of the web. In fact, blogging isn’t as much of a technological innovation as it is a social phenomenon. The internet created a platform to enable free flowing communication and information exchange, but it wasn’t until blogging hit the mainstream that the web became a medium to capture society’s stream of consciousness. People of all backgrounds, interests, and biases now contribute to the global discourse on human affairs.

Blogs have been growing at an incredible rate. Technorati, a leading blog search engine has been keeping track of the growth in the blogosphere (the collection of blogs) since 2003. According to their stats, the number of blogs has doubled every five months for three straight years. Now they are tracking over 22 million blogs with 70,000 new blogs being added every day! While only a small percentage of blogs are regularly updated, this explosion in growth has had an interesting impact on a variety of facets of daily life.

Politics

Political blogs are some of the most common blogs in the blogosphere. During the 2004 presidential campaign, Howard Dean became the first presidential candidate to use blogging as a way to reach out to his supporters. Through blogging he was able to establish a loyal following before the traditional media outlets took him seriously. Now, it is common practice for political candidates of all levels to use blogs as a campaign tool.

Corporate America

Just as with politics, it is becoming increasingly common for corporate executives to create blogs in an effort to reach out to customers. In the post-Enron era, blogs help executives appear more approachable and transparent. Especially in high tech companies, it is not uncommon for many executives including CEOs and VPs to have blogs. It isn’t clear yet if this is just a fad among executives to demonstrate their technical relevance or if it will continue long-term as a true mechanism for executives and customers to interact.

Blogging as a Business

Blogs have become a big business with a couple of recent blog networks being acquired by large companies. America Online purchased Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for an estimated $25 million. Weblogs, Inc. is a network of over 85 blogs covering a variety of topic areas. Now, new blog networks are popping up and it will be interesting to see if the traditional media outlets acquire the popular blog networks much as they did popular content sites in the late 1990s.

For individual blogs, it is a common practice to use Google Adsense as a means to earn money through advertising. While most blogs earn in the tens of dollars per month range, some of the most popular blogs reportedly earn thousands of dollars per month. For my blogs, the advertising revenue I collect covers the expenses of hosting my site with a little left over.

Journalism

In some cases, nationwide news stories have been sparked by bloggers. The recent Sony DRM fiasco started when security researcher Mark Russinovich posted a blog entry about a malicious rootkit he found on his computer. Bloggers played a key role in outing Dan Rather during Memogate. During Hurricane Katrina, one of the most detailed and widely read survival stories came from a blogger that worked at an internet service provider in New Orleans.

Bloggers outnumber journalists by a large number and are not constrained by deadlines, editors, or fact-checking. As more stories are scooped by bloggers and as more topics are covered than traditional media outlets can get to, the line between journalism and blogging begins to blur. Yahoo! made headlines of their own recently by including blog entries as part of their news portal. This has become the source of intense debate with some arguing that blogging is a form of journalism (i.e., citizen journalism) and others in fierce opposition. Whether blogging fits your definition of journalism, if you respect a blog’s author and find the content informative, there is no reason it shouldn’t be available right next to traditional news sources in your news portal of choice. Just as with journalism, a blog is only as good as its source (or sources).

Fad or Future?

While blogging has certain fad-like qualities because it is new and cool, I believe we’ve only seen the beginning. People have been writing their thoughts on the web for over 10 years, but in the last 5 years blogging has helped legitimize the practice. Is the blogosphere perfect? Definitely not. While it is a great environment to read other people’s ideas, those ideas may not always be fact-based, insightful, or politically/culturally correct. However, blogging does provide anyone with access to the web a way to write about anything they want and potentially reach a global audience. This has not been possible in the past and we’ve only begun to see the consequences. At a minimum, blogging is making our society more transparent and causing an acceleration in the flattening of the world. The only real question is when are you going to start a blog?

Originally published at web.archive.org.