Home > Articles > Blogolution – Part 2
Blogolution – Part 2

In the first part of this article, I gave a gentle introduction to the world of blogging (something I referred to as Blogopolis in that issue). I primarily concentrated on a couple of aspects of blogging – it’s onset and what’s being blogged.

In this article, I will attempt to - classify blogs and bring up issues that have arisen.

Classifying Blogs

Let me restate the meaning of the word blog from the first part of this article - “To put it straight without much elaboration, a blog is a frequent (which depends from blogger to blogger) record/commentary/small essay/article/blurb about content on the web, personal experience, observations or public events possibly with an option of readers feedback, which may or may not be used.” It is more than clear that this is a very broad, dangerously close to vague, definition at best. Classifying something which is vaguely defined is not easy either. For the evolution of this activity of internet publishing has affected other methods of internet publishing, bringing them closer – on the fringe – of the Blogosphere. Hence, there exist items in the classification which existed even before the word “blog” was coined! People blogged before they knew that they were blogging. However, blogging became mainstream when the blogging tools made the task of adding a blog entry easier than composing email.

So, anyhow, here is the classification
  • Community Blogs - Blogging as a collective. The topics and access to these are usually restricted. Somewhat of a relative of a mailing list.
  • Personal Blogs/Journals - Bloggers typically use personal blogs to express individual day-to-day activities and thoughts.
  • PhotoBlogs - The primary content posted on these blogs is pictures.
  • Moblogs - Moblogging allows bloggers to add postings to their blog sites from almost anywhere at any time, using a cellphone, RIM Blackberry, or wireless handheld computer.
  • Wikis - Unstructured, semi autolinking, collective/individual blog. Unlike most other blogs, wiki’s are not sorted by date and are very famous in work situations.

The success of blogging phenomenon is undeniable. Quite expectedly, their is a push to further the blogolution. Creative juices have flown all around… I picked up the scent of this one - Semantic Blogs at Hewlett Packard. Semantic Blogs attempt to evolve the concept of blogs by making the underlying meta-data richer - with semantics. Something akin to the evolution from flat-files to XML.

Motivations, or lack there off, for blogging

This is a tough one. Why blog? If I told you I own a printing press and would print anything you want, whenever you want and distribute it out in any public places you want, in all the cities you want with a “Take One” board by it – all for free, would you blog? If I had not known of blogs, I would have guessed most people would have said “No”. But, knowing blogs, even this is a hard question.

Every individual, to a certain degree, desires that their views, their thoughts, their voice be heard - for various reasons. Blogging provides an organized, flexible, open and easily accessible infrastructure for people to do so. Easily accessible is probably an understatement - especially when compared to other publishing media. This infrastructure provides the shortest part from that individual’s head to a publishable media. That’s why blogging is such a revolutionary concept - and a reality. Yet, some people do not blog. They too have thoughts they would like to share - but there’s something that’s stopping them from doing so. Some of these possible hurdles, which people are unable to cross, are discussed in the following section.

Issues with Blogging

Privacy, anonymity, audiance selection and access control

I don’t want everything I say heard by everyone. If I blog, I wouldn’t want everything I blog read by just any one. The level and type of access control desired depends on the poster of the content and the content itself. To people who are more aware of mechanisms of security, monitoring/surviellane and of-course the power of obtaining such information from the media operator by instrument of law, there is a significant problem with blogging. After all, we live in the age where surviellance is at it’s unprecedented high - The Echelon Project, The PATRIOT Act in the US, The U.S. Total Information Awareness Act. To post your opinion on the web… you are feeding information about yourself straight into the mouth’s of these surviellance systems. A woman in Canada suffered consequences of writing an email to her friend about her son “bombing” in the school. With all due respect to the governing bodies, a lot of people do not trust them - in several regards. Hence, such people are less likely to blog. By the same argument, it might be said that people apathetic about privacy concerns are more likely to blog.

Another view of this problem: You blogged something yesterday, now you’re ashamed of it (for any reason); and you can not erase it! This is a classic problem. In context of online media, it’s effect is elevated by the heavily archived nature of the Internet. If you blog, be ready to own up what you said yesterday. You must always be careful what you want to put down in your permanent record! On the flip side - one should be able to express what he stands for. A common advice for ages has been “think twice before your thoughts leave your lips” … well the new age version goes like - “think thrice before your thoughts become permanent in your blog”. I like to call it the responsibility of a blogger to herself.

A blogger should also respect the privacy of the target of his blog. If you blog about your children/parents/friends/significant other, you must respect their privacy.

A lot of bloggers, who care about social anonymity, blog anonymously. I must point out though that real anonymity on the web practically doesn’t exist - did you know RIAA is suing quite a few hundreds of “John Doe”s (I wonder when someone will sue RIAA on this for gender bias).

Lazyness

Then there are people who just don’t find it worth their effort. Everyone know the mysterious ways lazyness works.

Choosing between doing and observing

A lot of blogging is penning down observations. In a lot of cases, observation is followed by an act - based on the observation. But, that’s not a given as well. So a lot of people merely observe and contribute the the huge pool of information - a lot of it duplicated. I must point out to another group of people here. And these people have chosen to contribute to another pool - that of source code. Blogging takes time, and some people would rather spend their time contributing in another way. Then there are people who belong to both.

Losing the spirit

One important aspect of blogging is the concept of independent thought, originality. In a way, this is the spirit of blogging. To know that people read your writings is a good ego boost as well. Somewhere down the line, bloggers get affected by their audiences. Suddenly, they become involved in seeing their numbers - how many readers, how many referrers, even how much money through ads - and eventually lose the spirit. It’s an individual reaction - yet worth mentioning.

Apathy towards blogging

Finally, a real life catch all reason for not blogging. Some people just don’t want to! THey just don’t care, or they just don’t want to. Also some poeple just don’t know about blogs - and - in related news, a recent slashdot poll explains some of this behaviour!

Corporate acceptance

The emergence of blogging has not been unnoticed by the corporate world. Afterall, they must look into all possible ways to make their organization work better… and make more moola. Blogging has certain obvious advantages for them - it improves employee interaction - horizontal and vertical, build knowledge bases - extract the corporate knowledge living in the heads of the people to the digitized medium. Another great benefit is ability to give the company a different, more human face, through it’s employees, one which is perhaps more welcome by the swarms of blog readers. It is also quite effective when companies provide asynchronous communications about progress of work to it’s clients through blog like media. The clients can keep track of the progress and can avoid unneccessary chatter - trivial and irrelevant questions need not be discussed - rather their answers evident from the blogs.

One of the most successful forms of blogging that has found acceptance in corporate world is Wiki. The ease of putting something down in a wiki is simply irresistable. One of the most interesting thing about a wiki is that it’s not structure enforcing. It’s flexibility in expressing the content desired to be published is unparalleled.

Useful articles & blogs

Blogging

Moblogs

Privacy, anonymity, audiance selection and access control

Corporate Acceptance

Learn more about our vertical solutions