According to Blood (2004, p. 53), weblogs first appeared in the late 1990s, but in a different style to the diary form that most internet users are now accustomed to. The main purpose of early weblogs was to provide links to other pages, generally accompanied by a short comment or annotation from the blogger. The idea behind this was that they were to act as a filter for the multitudes of information that was available online. The term "weblog" was first used by Jorn Barger in 1997, who described it as "A Web page where a Web logger 'logs' all the other Web pages she finds interesting" (Barger, 1997; in Blood, 2004, p. 54). At that time, blogging was a relatively exclusive medium, as it required the blogger to use HTML code to construct their website. However, in 1999, weblog publication software such as Pitas.com and Blogger.com became available on the internet. Blogger was particularly easy to use and became very popular. Many of those new to the blogging community began posting entries without hyperlinks, which was the beginning of the blog as an online journal. In 2000, Blogger launched the permalink, which gave each blog entry its own unique URL or web address, making it possible to link to specific posts within a blog. The permalink is now a standard feature of weblogs. Popular blog providers today include Blogger, LiveJournal and Xanga.
The popularity of blogging has blurred the distinction between what is seen as public and private. There are many blogs that serve to document a specific subject and are intended for large audiences (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, and Swartz, 2004, p. 43), but the most common understanding of a blog is of an online diary. While diaries have traditionally been a private medium, the blog effectively broadcasts them to the world. Nussbaum (2004) captures the contradiction of this phenomenon through her case study of a teenage blogger in New York:
"J.'s sense of private and public was filled with these kinds of contradictions: he wanted his posts to be read, and feared that people would read them, and hoped that people would read them, and didn't care if people read them."
While many blog providers offer the option of "Private" or "Friends Only" posts, relatively few bloggers worry about utilising this (Nussbaum, 2004). Diary bloggers usually write for a select audience and may express surprise to learn that people outside that audience have read their blog (Miller & Shepherd, 2004). The content in some blogs is intensely personal, and were it not posted by the bloggers themselves, one might feel as if they were intruding on the author by reading it. When researching blogging culture, Nussbaum (2004) learned of bloggers who had written explicitly about personal experiences of sex, self-harm, eating disorders, and other topics that people generally feel uncomfortable about discussing publicly. Miller and Shepherd (2004) describe a new culture of mediated exhibition and mediated voyeurism, which has developed with the rise of the blog culture. This ideological shift has significant implications on the way society views information. Firstly, blogs have the potential to impact on relationships between people. In Utah in the United States, a blogger posted ruthless criticism of her upbringing and her co-workers, which resulted in the loss of her job and damage to her relationship with her parents when her blog was discovered (St. John, 2003, inMiller & Shepherd, 2004). Perhaps more seriously, since many bloggers often do not consider their potentially wide audience, they may nonchalantly reveal personally identifiable information, which could potentially result in physical harm to them. However, bloggers have expressed a number of positives to come from this relatively new found blog culture. Blogs are seen as an easy and efficient way of keeping friends and family informed on the blogger's life, and are less intrusive than letters, e-mails, or telephone calls. Blogs have also been described as a catharsis, whereby the blogger can express thoughts and emotions as a form of therapy.
The traditional linking nature of blogs has helped facilitate the growth of virtual communities centred around these blogs. Bloggers may develop relationships with other people when linking to other blogs in their posts, or commenting on others' entries (Miller & Shepherd, 2004). LiveJournal.com in particular emphasises the interactive element of blogs. For example, each user has a friends page that shows the most recent entries from everyone they list as a friend. Users may also join "LJ communities", where multiple users with common interests can post entries to a group blog. Blogdrive offers a tag board, where users can post general comments to each other, not necessarily about specific posts. However, all blog providers tend to foster virtual communities in varying degrees. LiveJournal's friends feature allows for analysis of the connections between bloggers on the site; 80 percent of friendship listings are mutual, and the majority of mutual friendships are based upon commonalities in interests, location and age (Kumar, Novak, Raghavan, & Tomkins, 2004). In a world that is becoming increasingly centred on the utilisation of mass media technologies, virtual communities could potentially become our main way of interacting with other people. We already see people forming friendships and other relationships based solely on the internet or phone. There are blogs that have been maintained from every continent on earth, even Antarctica, though the majority of blogs are based in the United States, Canada, England, Russia and Australia (Kumar et al., 2004, p. 36).
The development of easy-to-use blogging software has given more people, who may lack the appropriate technical knowledge to hand code their own websites, the chance to maintain their own webpage. Nardi et al. (2004, p. 44) identifies the role of blogs in giving people a voice on the worldwide forum of the internet. Blogs provide a vehicle for commentary on a wide range of issues and topics, as well as a community-style forum from which to receive feedback. Andrew Sullivan, a journalist and blogger, has described the rise of the blog as a "publishing revolution", with bloggers "seizing the means of production" and being able to edit and publish their own work, thus retaining total control over it (Miller and Shepherd, 2004). Gallo (2004) quotes Hans Magnus Enzensberger:
"There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming, or broadcasting. The question is not whether the media are manipulated, but who manipulates them. A revolutionary plan should not require manipulators to disappear; on the contrary, it must make everyone a manipulator."
Blogs are hence a key part of the 'information age' or 'information society' that we are often said to be living in. The blog has enabled more and more ordinary citizens to become "manipulators" of information and the media. Bloggers have the freedom to express themselves however they like, whenever they like. Webster (1995) describes the information age as follows:
"to some it heralds the emergence of a highly educated public which has ready access to knowledge while to others it means a deluge of trivia, sensationalism and misleading propaganda" (Webster, 1995, p. 2).
Blogs represent a relatively new source from which we can derive information. The medium is most popular among teenagers and people in their early to mid-twenties (Kumar et al., 2004, p. 36). As this youth demographic ages, some signal the blog as leading to the eventual replacement of traditional media. Miller and Shepherd (2004) refer to the j-blog, a subgenre of the blog that serves as a platform for "do-it-yourself journalism". Gallo (2004) argues that blogs will complement, rather than replace existing media outlets. The immediacy of the medium means that bloggers are able to comment on news and other events in real time, without the need for approval from an editor. They allow for a greater diversity of opinions on a range of issues. While Andrew Sullivan describes the blog as "unvarnished, raw, unmediated" and "democratic in the best sense of the word", Gallo believes they represent no immediate threat to institutional journalism. We are, however, starting to see a "convergence between the blogosphere and mainstream media"; for example, a number of journalists maintain blogs, and some bloggers have signed contracts with media outlets (Gallo, 2004).
Miller and Shepherd (2004) describe the blog as a convergence of many other types of media and genres. It can serve as a diary, a news service, an opinion column, a homepage and much more. The blog culture, or subculture that exists on the internet today has seen an increasing readiness to disclose information that was once seen as taboo. It has also helped to develop communities and relationships online, and allowed a greater variety of voices to challenge the status quo. The reverse chronological format of the blog sometimes gives the impression of greater realism, though this is not necessarily the case; almost anyone can post to a blog and write whatever they like. For this reason, it seems unlikely that blogs will overthrow established media outlets in the near future. However, there is little doubt that, in the space of a decade, blogs have had a significant impact on society and will continue to do so in the future.
Credit to Lee-Ann Khoh, Yahoo Contributor Network
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