Lingua inglese - Blogs and Bloggers

Blogs and bloggers

a) 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 30 million.

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.