Lingua inglese - Blogs and Bloggers

Blogs and bloggers

It would be folly for a newspaper to ignore the rise of the blog. Blogs are everywhere, seemingly breeding like mice, and subject to the most ridiculous statistical inflation. The top end estimate suggests there are more than 100 million; the more conservative end puts the figure at about 30m.

Despite their prevalence, there remains widespread misunderstanding about what a blog is and who bloggers are, particularly among those in what the blogosphere refers to as "MSM" (mainstream media). I remember being asked what a blog was in front of a colleague who keeps one. Wanting to keep the explanation short, I said, "It's a kind of online diary with comments and links." My colleague's displeasure at having his oeuvre described as "a diary" was palpable.

The original term from which blog is derived is "weblog", though there is now a tendency to use blog as shorthand. Rich Gordon, a media journalist and blogger in America,

Trawled a database of leading papers from last week to discover that "weblog" appeared in 45 articles but "blog" appeared in 412. So "weblog", it would seem, is all but dead.

On Guardian Unlimited, we have half a dozen blogs, and are about to add more, most notably our new comment blog (called "Comment is Free", in a nod to the Guardian's distinguished editor, CP Scott).

What has interested me about the reaction from media commentators and writers is that, in some quarters, it is clear there is a belief that blogging is in some way different from journalism. "Bloggers" might be the generic term used for anyone with a blog, but blogger and journalist are not mutually exclusive terms. But to their surprise, not all journalists are particularly great at it. As a blog is nothing more than a publishing platform, then it ought to suit them, but the fact that blogging encourages those who can point to other source material for discussion.

(linking) and adopt a conversational tone which invites other observations means that it is not always for everyone.

New York magazine has just published a list of the 50 most popular blogs in the world. At the top is a blog called Boing Boing, which is a collective effort by some of the sharpest people at the forefront of spreading internet zeitgeist. In some ways Boing Boing serves a traditional journalistic function enacted on the web. But third in the list is Postsecret.com, a blog where people anonymously post their biggest secrets. Technology and politics still dominate most of the list, and while the American bloggers still rule, the rapid increase in Japanese and even Chinese blogs in the top 50 demonstrates that blogging is a globalised trend.

It is also interesting to note that Nick Denton, who has a string of blogs in the top 50 - including the excellent media blog Gawker and the politically influential Wonkette - is, in fact, British.

There will always be a number of voices on blogs.

who react violently to the idea that mainstream media organisations can or even should blog at all. Personally, I think that if we fail to engage our journalists with the possibility of blogging, then we are pretty much consigning ourselves to history. This week we ran a post by one of the Guardian's music writers Dorian Lynskey who bravely sat and blogged the Brit Awards for our arts blog "Culture Vulture" live.

It was a great way to use the "latest first" facility of blog publishing and its wit drew praise from many of the comments. On Thursday one of our news team, Simon Jeffrey, posted on our news blog about the issues surrounding the publication of Abu Ghraib images - again the facility of the blog enabled him to incorporate wide-ranging links and illustrate the unfolding argument far more comprehensively than would have been possible in print.

So what is a blog? Let's just say it is an opportunity, not a threat.

From The Guardian (Editor's week by

Emily Bell - February 18, 2006