Tag: Weblogs

Sometimes I mean to write something and then while I’m procrastinating somebody goes ahead and writes it for me (only usually much better than I could.) Such it is with Virginia Postrel who tried to explain weblogs to Alex Beam. Postrel writes,

Others [weblogs] are a more civilized version of online discussion groups. Because each person has his or her own site, the reader who wants to follow the discussion does not have to read stupid flamers or irrelevant comments. You can read the blogs you know to be interesting and ignore the rest. Or if there’s a discussion of a topic you find uninteresting, you can ignore it. I don’t know if you subscribe to any listserve discussion groups, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower than with blogs — for the simple reason that it’s easy to tune out blogs you don’t find valuable.

Yes, yes, a million times yes. I’ve been thinking along the same lines because of something I read on the Wired web site back in the day (i.e. 1996 or so). At that time, of course, the web was much younger and an enormous percentage of Internet users were posting to Usenet on a regular basis.

At which point someone Wired suggested that people ditch Usenet for the web. Instead of posting articles and replies in a newsgroup, why not just put up a web page? Then someone could write a reply and put it on their web site, etc.

I’ll admit it — at the time I thought this was stupid. It would require easy-to-use tools to post to the web, a large community of users, and regular (even daily) updates. Yeah, who was ever going to go to all that trouble!!

And here we are in 2002 and that’s pretty much exactly what we have with all of these people starting weblogs.

Of course when people were just posting pictures of their cats, the journalistic line was “look at all of these people doing such frivolous things.” Now that people are writing about politics and culture and even the journalists themselves, the line is “who the hell do they think they are?”

Glenn Reynolds points to this Boston Globe article that suggests weblogging might be just a fad. Maybe, but that might not be the tragedy the Globe writer Hiawatha Bray thinks it is. Here’s Bray has to say,

How long can that last? There are a number of rival blog companies to contend with. More troubling is the fact that three quarters of [Pyra’s Evan] Williams’ subscribers got bored and gave up. Blogs are far easier to maintain than traditional Web sites, but they still need more effort than most bloggers are willing to supply.

This suggests that blogging is an ephemeral fad, destined to burn itself out in a year or two.

This does not surprise me at all, but is it really any reason to consider the activity a fad? I’ve been an information and writing junkie since I was very young, and, for whatever reason, most people do not share in my particular obsession. Very few people are going to have the time or interest to post with the frequency that someone like Reynolds does.

But that’s not really necessary. According to Bray, 473,000 people have used Blogger alone to start weblogs (and that does not include, obviously, people using Manila, Conversant, SlashCode or any of other available tools). Bray thinks it is a problem that only 25 percent of those people still update their weblogs on a regular basis.

But lets do some number crunching. Suppose between all of the weblog tools available, there have been 600,000 weblogs started in the past few years. Now lets assume that by 2005 only 5 percent of those will still be updated regularly. That would leave 30,000 regularly updated weblogs.

In contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 1999 there were barely over 10,000 newspapers in the United States. Of those only about 1,700 newspapers daily newspapers — the rest were either weekly or semiweekly.

In addition, there were almost 10,000 periodicals. Of those, only 648 were published weekly or semimonthly.

So even if only 5 percent of those people keep updating their weblogs regularly, there would still be a third more weblogs as there are newspapers and periodicals, and there would be far more frequently updated weblogs than newspaper and periodicals.

And, of course, that does not even take into account ongoing growth and creation of weblogs. The bottom line is that there are regularly updated weblogs on almost every topic imaginable and, moreover, for most topics there are far more weblogs than there is time to read them in a day.

Certainly many people will start and then abandon weblogs, just as many individuals and companies started and then abandoned various topical weblogs. But the tools are so cheap and the weblog idea so obvious, that weblogs are almost certainly here to stay.

Sources:

Pyra Labs at the forefront of Weblogging phenomenon. Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, March 25, 2002.

Communications and Information Technology (PDF) Statistical Abstract of the United States, U.S. Census Bureau, Table No. 931.

It seems like every weblog out there was talking about James Cowan’s article about weblogs for the National Post, ‘Bloggers’ emerge from internet underground. Seth Dillingham observed that the writer seemed to miss the point,

If you want to “understand” weblogs, you first need to ask yourself who or what you’re interested in. There are weblogs on nearly every topic imaginable. This is independent publishing: people write about what they know and live.

Yes. I do not even think the whole weblog format is all that important except that everyone seems to “get it” when they see a weblog (well, one of my relatives said he found the format incomprehensible and difficult to follow, so maybe not everyone) — and many people immediately want to start one of their own.

Seth notes that Cowan focuses on a comment by Dave Winer to the effect that a newspaper like the Los Angeles Times might write only a 600-word review of a computer product that “will probably skip the details.” What Winer and the writer both fail to note is that the 2,000 word review in a computer magazine might also leave out important details. Not because they are not aware of them, but because they are writing for large audiences and what qualifies as important does not have any objective meaning.

Consider something like MP3 players. Even some computer magazines will forget to mention that an MP3 player contains some sort of digital rights management scheme, much less provide detail on how sophisticated the DRM scheme is. A lot of the initial coverage of Apple’s iPod, for example, was short on details about the iPod’s copy protection scheme (the iPod has a DRM system, but it is trivial to get around).

Information tends to be extremely localized — there are a lot of people out there who will never show up being interviewed by professional journalists who nonetheless have a lot of information and knowledge to share. A weblog reduces the cost of sharing that information to the point that the primary constraint seems to be time rather than money (a couple years ago, I saw lots of hobby sites closing down for lack of money. Today, I typically see them shutting down due to lack of time and/or interest — which is also a variant on the lack of money, though, since if they were able to generate a lot of money off of their site, they probably would have more interest and time to devote to maintaining it).

There is something else going on here, though. I think weblogs are beginning to form a largely volunteer market for information and ideas. The currency in this market are links back to the sites that contribute to this market.

This occurred to me while reading Instapundit the other day. Glenn Reynolds had posted about an item. A couple hours later he posted a message saying that the person who claimed to be the first to alert him to this particular item was not happy that he had not been linked to on Reynolds’ page (and Reynolds then gave him credit and linked to his page).

Why was this person so disappointed? Because a link from Reynolds’ page means a temporary spike in traffic. I see this with some of my sites, where I receive lots of requests to link to specific sites from my own site because even though I might not have Reynolds’ readership, on some specific topics like animal rights, I can drive some decent traffic to other sites by linking to them.

So what happens here is an incentive system has emerged to share information in order to obtain links. This is a very positive trend. Early on when weblogs were all the craze, the big criticism was that this was an incestuous lot who linked back and forth amongst each other saying nothing, but the events of Sept. 11 really solidified this series of weblogs that is linked in a way that is eerily like an unorganized press agency.

Now the immediate retort is that very little of what goes on in weblogs is primary reporting. I write a lot about animal rights protests, for example, but have not been to one in over a decade. Duncan Smeed writes of the National Post article that,

He seemed to be saying that if it weren’t for ‘proper’ journalists webloggers wouldn’t have anything to write about and that all we’d be is a sad bunch of people talking about nothing. I guess we’re taking about professional journalists at the moment 😉

I think there is definitely such an attitude in some of the anti-blog pieces, but that makes about as much sense as saying, for example, that if Israel and the Arab nations were not always at each others throats, that Middle Eastern correspondents would have nothing to write about.

Weblogs are not replacing traditional reporting, but they are replacing traditional commentary and analysis. The real losers in the whole weblog phenomenon are the op-ed writers and other analysts. I do not turn to weblogs to tell me what the news is, as much as what the news means. This applies to everything from what the latest events in the Middle East mean to the ins and outs of some new piece of technology.

I’ve been very distracted the past couple months (I can hear my wife yelling in the background, “the last few months? Try at least since the late 1980s”), and keep forgetting to highlight some of the excellent weblogs that I’ve added to my “must read every morning” list. So, without further ado,

• Instapundit.Com — I’m not going to say about InstaPundit, since I’m jealous of all the traffic Glenn Reynolds receives as well as humbled by the fact that he writes even more than I do.
• Fredrik K.R. Norman — Norman has what I think is easily the best site design I’ve seen for a weblog, and I visit it several times a day to catch up on his eclectic postings.
• More Than Zero — Wow. Another site I’ve started checking several times a day. A lot of nice gems like The Unflappable Pursues the Unutterable
• The Daily Grail — This site suffers from the pseudo-science angle, but they dig up a lot of fascinating links to legitimate news stories.
• Catallaxy Files — an excellent, and regularly updated weblog from an Australian economist and “wannabe pundit.” Think Hayek on speed (that’s a good thing).