3 - LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction

Most of the sources quoted in this review are recent, and almost all come from laptop (ie online) research rather than desktop research. There are three main reasons for this:

The Weblog has been described as a “media native to the Web”[7] and it has existed in various forms since the birth of the Web itself - according to Dave Winer, “The first Weblog was the first website, http://info.cern.ch, the site built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. From this page TBL pointed to all the new sites as they came online.”[8]. It is only
recently, however, that media theorists and academics have picked up on the import of the form to contemporary media consumption.

This selection of sources has additionally been influenced by the speed with which the Web changes - by the time a text is published in the traditional sense - on paper - it could well already be out of date. It may refer to a defunct website, or contain no reference (or worse a disparaging one) to a site which, in the time between completion of the manuscript and publication, has become an invaluable resource.

Finally there is the question of whether printed media can do justice to online media. The Weblog thrives on hyperlinks, often very specific hyperlinks - to a certain post or even a particular comment. Printed media often ignores this specificity when re-printing Weblog content - Salam Pax’s The Baghdad Blog uses footnotes where hyperlinks occur, but gives only the address of the front page of the linked site, while Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers, Best of Blogs ignores links completely. This is unsatisfactory because the reader cannot immediately discover the exact reference the Blogger is making and cannot examine the matter under discussion. This is one reason that this report also exists in an online form[9].

Bloggers often use hyperlinks to make subtle points - the link often adds meaning to the text that anchors it to the page, as does the alternative text that appears when the reader hovers her cursor over the link. To remove hyperlinks, therefore, is to remove one layer of meaning from the text. So a printed version will always be inferior to the same text with hyperlinks.

A Brief History of the Weblog

Rebecca Blood has been a blogger since 1999, she is the author of several books on blogging, and has become known as a significant recorder of the medium’s earliest development. Her essay of
September 2000 ‘Weblogs: a history and perspective’[10]
has therefore become a key text for those writing on Weblogs. The text is, admittedly, fairly old in the rapidly moving world of blogging, but it remains an important reference when studying the rise in popularity of blogs.

Blood explains that by the beginning of 1999 there were only 23 Weblogs in existence (the term was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger). A community “sprang up”[11] around these Weblogs with each blogger linking to all the others, and what Blood describes as “bandwagon jumping” began. It soon “became difficult to read every Weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the new ones that were appearing.”[12] Bloggers began to link only to a selection of other Weblogs, identifying themselves with the community to which they wanted to belong.

She states that before the advent of easy to use blogging software, provided by companies such as Pitas and Blogger in the summer of 1999, blogs were the domain of the technically minded. In order to have a blog before this, the would-be blogger was obliged to learn the language of the Internet, HTML. In practice
this meant that bloggers were either self-taught coders or worked professionally in new media and blogged in their spare time. As Blood puts it “These were web enthusiasts”.

Blogging had existed for several years before this software came onto the market, but 1999 was the year that blogging first became accessible to all. Setting up a Weblog and posting entries to it was now no more difficult than setting up an e-mail account and sending e-mail. And because there was also free hosting for these blogs (via Blog*spot in the case of Blogger) and pre-existing but easily customizable templates, virtually no technical knowledge was required. All the prospective
blogger needs is a computer, an Internet connection and an opinion. This resulted in a fundamental shift in the nature, or rather the breadth of the blogging community; leading to an “explosion”[13]in the blogging population. It opened access up to those who did not have any particular technical skills. Soon other blogging services launched, including LiveJournal and others that did not have the same longevity.

To explain the somewhat nerdish hierarchy of Blogging: Moveable Type launched in 2001, providing more comprehensive blogging software for the blogger who was more technically aware. If a Blogger/Blog*Spot Weblog is perceived as ‘entry-level’ blogging (by bloggers certainly, although not necessarily by readers), then a Moveable Type blog tends to represent a more authoritative voice. This may be because Moveable Type is not a hosted service, requiring the blogger to install the software on their own service, and therefore requires more dedication to set up compared with the ease of starting a Blogger or LiveJournal account. Thus simply by starting their own blog, the Moveable Type blogger has already shown more dedication to blogging than the self-publisher using Blogger. Interestingly, Moveable Type launched TypePad, a paid-for hosted blog service in mid-2003.

The Semiotics of the Weblog

Blogging has spawned a host of neologisms. Here I will attempt to decipher and decode the meanings behind these the evolution of these words.

As mentioned in my review of Rebecca Blood’s essay ‘Weblogs: a history and perspective’, the term Weblog was coined by blogger Jorn Barger in 1997 to describe his site Robot Wisdom [14]. Obviously this combines the idea of an Internet basis (as with web-site), with ‘log’ - as in ship’s log or a computer’s log (i.e. record of actions/sites visited), as well as containing the concept of logging on, a phrase closely linked to visiting websites. The word was contracted into blog in early 1999 [15] which evolved into both the noun blogger and the verb to blog - used to mean both posting to a blog and being a blogger: ‘I’m going to blog this,’ or ‘I blog, my address is…’

Blogosphere is a term used by bloggers to describe the community within which they exist. The phrase was invented in 2001 by the blogger William Quick [16]. His intention was to find a word to describe “the intellectual cyberspace we bloggers occupy”. To do so, he combined ‘blog’ with the Ancient Greek word ‘logos’, which can be used variously to mean word, rationality, logic and reason. The term ‘sphere’ has been equated by Weblog commentator John Hiler with the concept of a biosphere: “a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system”[17] . The biological metaphor is one that will be explored later in this report. There is also a clear reference to Habermas’ Public Sphere in the phrase, whether intentional or otherwise.

Similarly Blogistan or Blogville are also used by bloggers (including Jay Rosen, who uses Blogistan because he finds Blogosphere “ugly sounding”[18] ). Derived from terms referring to nation-states or small towns, these phrases highlight the emergence of a strong identification and articulation of a sense of community.

In a more recent essay [19], Rebecca Blood points to the importance of the post as the “basic unit” of the blog as opposed to “the article or the page. Bloggers write as much or as little as they choose on a topic, and although entries are presented together on the page, each post is given a permalink, so that individual entries can be referenced separately.” ‘Post’ contains echoes of putting up notices on an Internet message board, a format that invites discussion. Neither article nor page contain that meaning, both suggest something finished, which does not invite feedback from the reader.

Feedback is provided in the form of comments and TrackBack. Most of the main blogging tools - Blogger, Moveable Type and LiveJournal included - offer the opportunity for bloggers to have post pages where comments appear on the same page as the post to which they refer rather than in a pop-up box. Moveable Type and several third-party Weblog utility providers, including Haloscan [20], also offer TrackBack, which allows readers who wish to make more lengthy responses on their own Weblogs to leave a link to their own post on the page that has inspired it. Thus readers of the original post can then look at the reactions of others.

Blogging and Editors

According to JD Lasica, “Weblogging will drive a powerful new form of amateur journalism as millions of Net users - young people especially - take on the role of columnist, reporter, analyst and publisher while fashioning their own personal broadcasting networks.” [21] Such an expansion of the journalistic franchise is clearly an exciting prospect, but there are necessarily caveats to this brave new world of blog-journalism.

Many commentators have expressed their views that without editing, a Weblog can never be journalism. Among them is Joan Connell, former executive producer for opinion and communities at MSNBC [22]. Bill Thompson writes on the BBC’s website that “without editors to correct syntax, tidy up the story structure or check facts, it is generally impossible to rely on anything one finds in a blog without verifying it somewhere else - often the much-maligned mainstream media”[23] . Of course this should be taken with a pinch of salt, since the institution for which Thompson is writing is very much part of “the much-maligned mainstream media”.

Journalist-Bloggers, however, have various reactions to this. Jay Rosen, professor of Journalism at New York University, writes on his site that “In journalism prior to the Weblog, the journalist had an editor and the editor represented the reader. In journalism after the Weblog the journalist has (writerly) readers, and the readers represent an editor.” [24] Indeed readers often act as fact-checkers. Technology journalist and blogger Dan Gillmor discusses this in his essay ‘Moving Toward Participatory Journalism’ [25]:

“My readers know more than I do, sometimes individually on specific topics, but always collectively. This is similar for all journalists, no matter what their beat is. And having readers’ feedback and participation presents a great opportunity and not a threat, because when we ask our readers for help and knowledge they are willing to share it - and through that sharing, we all benefit.”

The flip side of this particular coin is the question of editing Weblogs that are part of a traditional news outlet’s website. Writing about his MSNBC blog Altercation, Eric Alterman wonders “maybe... Altercation ain’t a blog. I have an editor. This is in part because I want one and in part, I imagine because the good folks at MSNBC.com do not entirely trust me without one.” [26]. He goes on to state, “Ideally, I think every blogger would benefit from having an editor.”[27]

This raises an important question: Is a Weblog with an editor still a Weblog? At least one journalist-blogger has stated that she would rather not have an editor on for her Weblog: “[T]here’s an enormous freedom in being able to present yourself precisely as you want to, however sloppily, irrationally or erratically” [28] . This, however, could not possibly be suitable for a Weblog associated with an organization whose reputation is staked on writing that is tidy, rational and regular, such as a newspaper.

Several bloggers who work in journalism have found their jobs in danger because of what they have written in a personal Weblog. One editor explained that he felt his “newspaper’s standards and public responsibilities [were] compromised” [29] when a long-term staff member started a Weblog dealing with issues he had previously covered for the newspaper. He asked, “[I]s a Weblog truly a Weblog if it is supervised editorially? If the answer is no and that anything but complete freedom is a perversion of the genre, then I think editors must ask themselves if they are comfortable having their news organization represented in that manner.”

Dan Gillmor points out that the ending of this particular tale seems to be “a clumsy compromise” [30], giving the staff member “a web-only column that resembled a blog.” Dave Winer, too, points out that “Weblogs are unique in that only a Weblog gives you a publication where your ideas can stand alone without interference. It gives the public writer a kind of relaxation not available in other forms. That might mean that in some sense the "quality" of the writing is different, but I would not say lower, assuming the purpose of writing is to inform, not to impress. I would choose a few spelling or grammatical errors over factual errors. Like the child's game of telephone, stories that are passed from department to department in a professional organization can morph into something that bears no resemblance to the facts, or to the original author's point of view.” [31]

A taxonomy of the Weblog

A Weblog is usually defined as any website consisting of dated entries with the most recent at the top. From there, the definition can get more complicated. Dave Winer has compiled a list of known features of Weblogs [32]. The most pertinent of these to the issues addressed by this dissertation are:
• “The unedited voice of a person” (note that he does not specify the unedited words of a person)
• “Archives and Permalinks” - to allow other bloggers to link to posts.
• “Comments” - to allow readers to respond on that Weblog.
• “TrackBack” - to allow bloggers to respond on their own Weblog.
• “Mailto” - to allow readers to respond via email.

Winer makes it clear, however, that a site does not have to have all (or indeed most) of the features he lists in order to be a Weblog. Beyond this, the content of each Weblog depends on the blog-author. Several commentators have attempted to classify Weblogs in order to make distinctions firstly between different kinds of blogger and secondly between different kinds of Weblog.

As stated earlier, a biological metaphor can be applied to the Weblog due to what one commentator [33] views as a symbiotic relationship between bloggers and journalists. Thus the term taxonomy, which is used to mean the classification of biological organisms seems to be appropriate for this topic.
Jay Rosen states as a response to a comment on his Weblog: “If we want to get started with mapping different motivations and situations, we might identify:

• closed system blogs, like inside a company
• open system, on the Web, private or personal content (written for family, friends, E-pals.)
• open system, on the Web, public content, via commercial provider (professional journalists who blog fit here)
• open system, on the Web, public content, via independent provider (bloggers would be this)
• open system, on the Web, public content, via educational provider (some bloggers fit here) [including Rosen himself, who blogs with an New York University URL]
• open system, on the Web, scholarly/technical content, via commercial provider.

and so on. Only blogs in categories 3, 4, 5 can be journalism weblogs.” [34]

Each of these broad definitions may then be further broken down into two phyla, Which represent the two distinct styles of Weblog, as defined by Rebecca Blood [35]. These are the “filter-style Weblog” and the “journal-style blog”.

The filter-style Weblog, consisting of links to other interesting sites, with only the briefest of comments from the author was the original format of the Weblog. Blood states, “Many current Weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note.... An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand;”

The journal-style Weblog has evolved, by Blood’s reckoning, because of the blogging utility Blogger. “Blogger itself places no restrictions on the form of content being posted. Its web interface, accessible from any browser, consists of an empty form box into which the blogger can type... anything”. She compares this with the community Weblog Metafilter: “Here the writer is presented with three form boxes: the first for the URL of the referenced site, the second for the title of the entry, and the third for whatever commentary the writer would like to add.”

Within these categories of Weblog, there are obviously further delineations between subject matter. These tend to fall into much the same categories as do Zines according to Duncombe’s Zine Taxonomy [36]: “Fanzines [science fiction, music, sports, television and film, etc]… Political Zines… Personal Zines, or perzines… Scene Zines… Network Zines… Fringe Culture Zines… Religious Zines… Vocational Zines… Health Zines… Sex Zines… Travel Zines… Comix… Literary Zines… Art Zines… The Rest.” While there is a clear distinction in the relative prodction of these genres, Duncombe’s categories remain entirely applicable to the categorizing of Weblogs. The majority of Weblogs would then be perblogs, defined by Duncombe as “Personal diaries open to the public; shared notes on the day-to-day life, thoughts and experiences of the writer.” [37].

Blogs and Zines

The most common assertion made by those commentating on Weblogs is that there is cross-pollination between blogging and journalism, but not all bloggers are “doing journalism” [38] (This seems to me to be a particularly unwieldy way to describe the act. I prefer JD Lasica’s “committing random acts of journalism” [39], as it suggests the unintentional journalism committed by bloggers as well as implying a transgression of some kind - perhaps stepping over the line from public to journalist, or worse still blurring the edges of such a line. I might however choose to use “performing journalism”, which gives both a sense of writing for an audience, and the accuracy required of journalism, as performing an operation.) Not even all blogs by journalists are journalism. This is obviously the case - Jane Perrone’s gardening Weblog is clearly not journalism, but her work on the Guardian’s Weblog is. What then can blogging bring to journalism?

Privileging the Personal
The answer seems to be that blogging brings the same benefits as zines, with the added advantage of easy access on the part of both editors and readers. Duncombe views perzines as political in themselves: “The rule of regarding the publication of news in mainstream media is “man bites dog” – that is, what is considered newsworthy is what is out of the ordinary – what Jen [Payne, a perzine writer] and many other writers of perzines honor the opposite: the everyday.” [40] He seems to believe that by writing about the mundane perzine writers are subverting traditional news media.

Chris Atton, writing in the Journal of Mundane Behavior draws a similar conclusion in his analysis of perzines and perblogs: “First, by becoming foregrounded [mundane occurrences described in a perzine or perblog] remind us of the power and significance such beliefs, choices and decisions have for ordinary people. Second, they encourage us to look at web-based communication not simply in terms of the (now overworked) ‘empowering’ and rhizomatic models of networked, democratic opportunity (that is, as an engine for social change), nor simply as additional opportunities for commerce and industry, but as instances of everyday sociality–and to look at research into such communication practices as ethnomethodological ” [41] Thus in highlighting the everyday, the writer lays emphasis upon the everyday process of communication, as much as he or she demonstrates his own sense of self-importance. Thus, a form of post-modern Deconstructivist, pseudo-anthropological analysis of the operation of the media is achieved, helping to highlight implicit or overlooked characteristics.

Community
Duncombe stresses the importance of the community, or “network” in zine production: “If community is traditionally thought of as a homogenous group of individuals bound together by their commonality, a zine network proposes something different: a community of people linked via bonds of difference, each sharing their originality” [42]. To my mind, however, this is a distinctly rose-tinted view of zines – certainly my zine production was never characterized by involvement within a community.

In blogging too, community is a key term, but tends to privilege homogeneity, rather than reject it. Popular Weblog rings such as DykeWrite [43] and Blogging Brits [44] encourage bloggers to read and comment on the posts of other writers who have at least one aspect of their life in common. Within these groups, however there can be a very wide range of experience and blogging style. In this sense, blogging is made up of micro-networks, heterogeneous groups with a certain aspect in common.

Community, however, can also have the effect of ghettoization, which is to say that it can encourage insularity. A reader who only looks at certain types of Weblog will inevitably miss out on others. As Duncombe points out, self-ghettoization requires a weapon in order to keep out those ‘who don’t belong’. In the case of zines “the weapon used to repel the invaders and keep the faithful in line is the accusation of ‘selling out’”. This became particularly important in blogging terms during the Raging Cow debacle of March 2003, when Dr Pepper decided to advertise their new fizzy milk drink using bloggers [45]. Sending teenage blogger Nicole and a group of friends to Dallas in return for them publicizing the drink on their Weblogs (and not mentioning that they had been briefed to do so by Dr Pepper) was certainly an interesting viral marketing scheme, it failed, however when the bloggers caught on. A boycott was organized at Bloggerheads [46], a site dedicated to using blogs for political purposes. Soon the Bloggerheads site appeared higher in the results of a Google search for “Raging Cow” than Raging Cow did!

But this does not mean to say that bloggers are against marketing. Far from it. Many bloggers have links in their sidebars to Amazon wishlists, or their own PayPal account, so readers can contribute to their bank balances. With the advent of the new Blogger ad-free Navbar (Weblogs hosted by Blog*Spot previously contained ads at the top of the page), Blogger is offering users the chance to earn money from their Weblogs by posting customizable, targeted Google adverts [47] in their sidebars.

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[7] Scott Rosenburg, Managing Editor, Salon. Quoted in Lasica 2003, 72. cf Blood 2003, 61 “The Weblog is arguably the first form native to the web.
[8] Winer, 1999 http://newhome.weblogs.com/historyOfWeblogs
[9] http://dissblog.blogspot.com
[10] Blood, 2000 http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
[11] ibid
[12]ibid
[13]ibid
[14] See http://www.robotwisdom.com/weblogs/ for his Weblog Resources FAQ
[15]ibid
[16]Quick, 2001 http://www.iw3p.com/DailyPundit/2001_12_30_dailypundit_archive.php#8315120
[17]Hiler, 2002 http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogosphere.htm
[18] http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/03/08/weblog_demos.html#comment2568
[19]Blood 2003, 61
[20] http://www.haloscan.com
[21]Lasica, (2001) http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/p1017958873.php
[22]Blood 2003, 62
[23]Thompson 2003 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2786761.stm
[24] Rosen 2004 http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/03/08/weblog_demos.html
[25] Gillmor 2003, 79
[26]Alterman 2003, 85
[27]ibid, 86
[28]Deborah Branscum quoted in Lasica 2003
[29] Toolan 2003, 93
[30] Gillmor 2004, 117
[31]Winer, 2003http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/whatMakesAWeblogAWeblog
[32]ibid
[33] Hiler 2002 http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogosphere.htm
[34]Rosen 2004 http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/03/08/weblog_demos.html#comment2567
[35]Blood 2000, http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
[36]Duncombe 1997, 9
[37] ibid
[38]Blood 2003, 61
[39]Lasica 2003, 71
[40] Duncombe 1997, 22
[41] Atton 2001 http://www.mundanebehavior.org/issues/v2n1/atton.htm
[42] Duncombe 1997, 51
[43] http://www.dykewrite.com
[44]http://www.bloggingbrits.co.uk/
[45] Walker 2003 http://slate.msn.com/id/2081419/
[46] http://www.bloggerheads.com/raging_cow/
[47]http://www.blogger.com/knowledge/2004/08/theres-adsense-in-my-blog.pyra