More interesting findings from Technorati’s “state of the blogosphere” report. This installment focuses on “posting volume,” or how active the active 55% of the world’s 14.4 million blogs really is. The study shows a clear and steady increase in the average posting rate across the blogosphere. The graph below shows how volume has spiked in response to certain events, from Howard Dean’s infamous scream following the Iowa primary to the July 7 London bombings.
Category Archives: Blogosphere
every second, a new blog is born
There’s a good “state of the blogosphere” post up on Technorati. According to the latest analysis, there are approximately 14.4 million blogs, and that number is on track to double every 5.5 months, with a new blog created each second. A noteworthy statistic, and one that has remained constant for at least a year, is that approximately 55% of blogs are active. So, high rate of birth, and high rate of stagnation. That’s the web.
when blogs band together 3 – the litblog co-op
“when blogs band together – a new hybrid form” – examining the phenomenon of multi-blog publications
Launched this May by Mark Sarvas, author of Elegant Variation, the litblog co-op unites 21 literary weblogs “for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace.” The LBC blog devotes its energies, and intermittent posting, to “Read This!” – a quarterly endorsement of an obscure or undeservedly ignored book, intended to expose important works that the mainstream press has ignored.
For as long as it has existed, the lit blogging community has sought to countervail the steadily shrinking coverage of books in the media, but it’s not at all clear whether their impact is felt beyond limited circles. “Read This!” seeks to amplify the strongest recommendations, resolving the bloggers’ voices into one crystalline note of praise that, hopefully, people will be unable to ignore.
The first volume to receive the LBC imprimatur is Kate Atkinson’s “Case Histories,” a literary riff on the traditional crime novel. The choice was by no means unanimous. Some complained that the book was not sufficiently needy of promotion, seeing as Atkinson’s previous novel, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum,” won the Whitbread award, and “Case Histories” is published by Little, Brown – not exactly a fringe press. But in the end, the opposing camps were reconciled (allowing the “minority opinion” to vent itself) and agreed to throw their collective weight behind Atkinson’s book. We have yet to see whether the endorsement will have any affect on the book’s sales (inclusion in Forbes’ “Best of the Web” certainly won’t hurt), but when enough influential voices start talking about the same thing, someone is bound to listen.
when blogs band together 2 – Gawker Media
“when blogs band together – a new hybrid form” – examining the phenomenon of multi-blog publications
Few media outfits have ridden the blog phenomenon quite as cleverly as Gawker Media, the three-year-old brainchild of publisher Nick Denton. Gawker Media “takes the weblog format and applies the business model of a traditional magazine,” bringing together some of the web’s most popular rags, including Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Wonkette, and Fleshbot. With some of the highest traffic figures on the web (and the ad revenue that comes with them) it’s not a stretch to say that Gawker Media has become the Condé Nast of the blogosphere.
But unlike that goliath of the magazine world, Denton’s fledgling empire deals almost exclusively in second-hand material, and its staff is made up entirely of editors with not a writer to be found. Gawker blogs are of the pointer variety, directing readers to juicy finds around the world wide web with a splash of wit or snarky commentary. Of course, this is the formula for millions of weblogs – a couple of links with a bit of context. Denton’s coup has been to identify the best curatorial talents and collect them under a single umbrella.
The network’s flagship is, of course, Gawker, the addictive Manhattan gossip sheet, considered a must-read by society-watchers and scandal junkies. Defamer is its L.A. counterpart. Gawker Media bloggers actually receive a modest annual salary and are required to hit a minimum number of posts per day. Currently, there are 13 blogs in the Gawker tent, but the network is sure to expand. There’s even a Gawker observer blog, Gawkerist, whose author’s calculated ploy to capture Denton’s attention recently succeeded in securing him the editorship of Gawker’s urban travel blog, Gridskipper.
Gawker Media’s rise indicates that there is a broad demand for savvy, charismatic guides through the information blitz of the web. Success does not depend on getting readers to spend long stretches of time on one of the 13 sites, only on getting them to visit briefly, catching an ad or two in their peripheral vision, before getting bounced somewhere else. Gawker Media is a trampoline. It’s where people come to get bounced. This suggests that, though the author may enjoy primacy in the world of print, on the web it is more often the editor that counts.
when blogs band together 1 – TPM Café
“when blogs band together – a new hybrid form” – examining the phenomenon of multi-blog publications
TPM Café is a new site from Joshua Micah Marshall, author of the immensely popular Talking Points Memo. Building on the success of his personal site, Marshall has set up a veritable fleet of weblogs by an impressive roster of writers, thinkers and activists – both established and first-time bloggers – in what he hopes to become a focal point for liberal political energies.
On the main page, you’ll find the Coffee House, a 13-author blog covering “issues ranging from public policy to the arts, books, science and religion” – the lead stories, as it were. To the side is a list of the cafe’s other blogs. The recently launched TPM Café Book Club will devote a rotating discussion space to a popular book, giving the author the opportunity to expand upon their work and engage with readers (there’s currently an interesting little spar between famed liberal activist Todd Gitlin and “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” author Thomas Frank). America Abroad brings together foreign affairs heavyweights like G. John Ikenberry, Ivo Daalder and Anne-Marie Slaughter to engage the whirlwind of American foreign policy. House of Labor is about “the future of the American labor movement,” while Warren Reports examines the American Middle Class. And there are several other blogs, including an open venue for registered readers, as well as a variety of discussion forums.
TPM Café seems to be off to a good start. It will be interesting to watch how Marshall makes the transition from blogger to editor.
when blogs band together – a new hybrid form
A million voices in the wilderness singing solo.
Most regular blog readers would agree that without aggregators like Bloglines or Newsgator, sifting through the day’s postings would be exceedingly tiresome, if not impossible. Why manage dozens of bookmarks, and plod through page after page, when a free aggregating service will keep all your favorite sites in one place, allowing for quick scanning of headlines to determine where you’d like to spend more time reading?
It’s like a newsstand stocked with publications that you yourself have syndicated. Different themes can be organized in different folders: here are my political feeds, here are my arts feeds, here are my tech feeds etc. These folders are like your daily magazines. Then there is Technorati, the web’s premier blog indexer, where readers can search over 13 million blogs by tag, keyword and prestige (number of incoming links).
Bloggers, too, have ways of tying each other together. Shout outs, quotes, comments, trackbacks, link lists – all of these serve to interweave, and this is in large part how the blogosphere has grown. Over time, certain blogs come to be associated with one another, and coherent communities emerge.
But what happens when blogs choose to aggregate themselves under a single masthead? What happens when the voices decide to group together in a chorus? Do they then become a newspaper? A magazine? A union? A league? A society? It may not yet have a name, but some blogs have in fact started banding together to form a new kind of hybrid publication that is difficult to define.
Part cocktail party, part basement pamphlet press. It’s looser than a magazine, and more conversational. It is a sort of union, but its dues are purely in the form of a blogger’s personal payload – their insight, their charisma, their dedication to certain issues, their unique voice. They are presided over by an editorial authority, but not one that gets in between the writers’ lines or sets a word limit. These are still very much blogs, and authors retain almost total autonomy. Their only obligation is to keep the good stuff coming. Over the next few days, I’ll be profiling a few of these sites. This is by no means a comprehensive list, so please don’t hesitate to recommend others that in some way fit the bill.
1. TPM Café
2. Gawker Media
3. the litblog co-op
the state of the blog: past, present & future
Since Ben’s on vacation (you may have noticed the crickets chirping in his absence), I’ve been in charge of pruning the comment- and trackback-spam that if:book and the rest of our website generates. Hopefully, you haven’t noticed much of this around here, but it arrives in ever-increasing volume: lately, we’ve been getting upwards of twenty comment-spams per day. They’ve become increasingly less coherent: while once they attempted to cajole our visitors to try out dubious sexual aids or patronize online casinos, the latest batch have been streams of random letters linking to websites that don’t seem to exist.
To combat the problem (which I imagine is much the same at any blog), we’ve installed a Movable Type plugin that filters comments and trackbacks. It does a pretty good job: like a spam filter in a mail program, it can guess what spam is, and it learns quickly. One curious piece of its method, however, might have wider repercussions for how we read & use blogs: it automatically suspects comments made on older posts to be comment spam. This is, by and large, correct: there aren’t a lot of people finding our old posts and leaving comments on them. But this does feel like we’re increasingly killing off old discussions. This ties into my musings from two weeks back, when I wondered how well blogs function as an archive.
A discussion at Slashdot zooms out to look at the ever decreasing signal-to-noise ratio from the soi-disantblogosphere as a whole. Spam blogs – often created to drive up Google rankings, for example – are becoming ever more common; just as it’s simple for you to create a blog, it’s simple for a robot to create a thousand. At what point does the sheer volume of spam start turning users away?
A decent guess, if the history of forms on the web is any indicator, is that something new will arise. Mentioned in the Slashdot discussion is Usenet, the newsgroup-based discussion system. Spam first reared its ugly head on Usenet, and by the late 1990s had almost consumed it. As the level of spam rose, users departed – some, undoubtedly, to the comparatively safer environs of the blogosphere. What comes after blogs?
While on the history of blogs: Matt Sharkey has an interesting history of suck.com (here helpfully archived by its creator, Carl Steadman)
. Suck wasn’t a blog as we know them (readers could email the author, but not directly leave comments for others to see), but it did premiere (in 1995) what would become a key concept of the blog, having fresh concept daily. It also brought snarky semi-anonymous commentators to the Web, and the idea of using hyperlinks for humor. They did get in five solid years, though, and the site is arguably an important milestone in the history of how we read online. Browsing through Steadman’s archive provides food for thought about archives on the web: while it’s still entertaining, you quickly notice that almost every one of the links is broken. Nothing lasts forever.
grant virtual asylum – adopt a chinese blog
People sometimes wonder what would have happened if the Soviet Union had survived long enough to experience the internet. It’s a delicious “what if” scenario to contemplate. The USSR was quite skilled at using broadcast and print media to achieve total message discipline (the Bush administration can only dream), but what would have happened if a totally decentralized medium like the web (a control freak’s nightmare) sprung up right under the Kremlin’s boots? Would the dissidents have bubbled over into cyberspace in a surging tide too powerful to control? Or would the the government have cracked down brutally, or cut off the emerging technology before it could develop, drawing the iron curtain still further over the information commons? Someone should write a novel (á la Thomas Harris, Philip Roth)..
But look to China today, and we can get at least some idea of what might have happened. Granted, China is now a booming frontier of global capitalism, having all but abandoned the communist economic model. But the regime is still quite Soviet in its attitudes toward the media (which it totally controls) and toward expressions of political dissent (which it forbids and punishes). The internet presents a particularly devilish challenge.
In response, the government has set up a “Great Firewall” blocking off certain sections of the web (anything from Google News to Human Rights Watch) that it would rather its citizens didn’t see. Not wanting to get shut out of the world’s biggest emerging market, American corporations like Yahoo, Google, and most recently Microsoft, have complied with state demands that certain services, and even certain terms like “democracy,” “freedom” or “human rights,” are blocked in Chinese versions of their web applications. In addition, the government recently passed legislation requiring all websites to be registered. Anything deemed inappropriate gets taken off its server. A hundred flowers may bloom on the internet, but not if the government cuts them off at the root.
It’s estimated there are about 1 million Chinese blogs, and that number is sure to increase ten, twenty a hundred fold. Who knows? If it gets to that point, the government probably won’t be able to keep up. But for now, bloggers with even slightly controversial politics are in danger of getting shut down. This is why some Chinese bloggers are moving their sites abroad, seeking political haven on western servers. Isaac Mao, a venture capitalist in Shanghai for internet startups, self-professed “meta idea” generator, and one of the first Chinese bloggers, has set up an “adopt-a-blog” program that matches up fellow bloggers with foreigners willing to make a little extra room on their servers. It’s a great idea, and a chance for the blogosphere to come together as a global community.
Additional links:
More about Isaac Mao in Wired: “Chinese Blogger Slams Microsoft”
Someone found a way to circumvent Microsoft’s block on “freedom,” “democracy” etc.: “Loophole lets ‘Freedom’ ring in Chinese MSN blogs” (with complete instructions here)
blog reading: what’s left behind
The basement of the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge sells used books. There’s an enormous market for used books in Cambridge, and anything interesting that winds up there tends to be immediately snapped up. The past few times I’ve gone to look at the fiction shelves, I’ve been struck by a big color-coded section in the middle that doesn’t change – a dozen or so books from Jerry Jenkins &Tim LaHaye’s phenomenally popular Left Behind series, a shotgun wedding of Tom Clancy and the Book of Revelation carried out over thirteen volumes (so far). About half the books on the shelf are the first volume. None of them look like they’ve been read. They’re quite cheap.
Since the books started coming out (in 1996), there’s been an almost complete absence of discussion of the books in the mainstream media, save the occasional outburst about this lack of discussion (“These books have sold 60,000,000 copies! And nobody we know reads them!”). I suspect my attitude towards the books is similar to that of many blue-state readers: we know these books are enormously popular in the middle of the country, and it’s clearly our cultural/political duty to find out why . . . but flipping through the first one in the basement of the Harvard Bookstore, I’m stricken by the wooden prose. I can’t read this. Also, there’s the matter of time: I still haven’t finished Proust. The same sort of thing seems to happen to other civic-minded would-be readers.
And then, on the Internet, Fred Clark’s blog Slacktivist gallops in to save the day. For the past year and a half, Mr. Clark has been engaged in a close reading of the series, explicating the text and the issues it raises in an increasingly fundamentalist America. This project isn’t a full-time project; his blog has other commentary, but once a week, he stops to analyze a few pages of Left Behind. It helps that Mr. Clark is a fine writer; his commentary is funny, personal – recollections from a Christian childhood pop up from time to time – and he has enough of a theological background to elucidate telling details and the history behind Jenkins & LaHaye’s particular brand of end-times fever.
It’s an admirable project as well because of the shear magnitude of it. In his first year and a half, he’s made it through 105 pages, working at the rate of roughly six days a page. By my calculations, it will take him eighty more years to finish the 4900 pages of the series, though additional prequels have been declared, which will take the total up somewhere over a century. Lengthwise, he seems to be running about neck-and-neck, though it’s hard to tell on the screen. This can’t help but remind one of “On Exactitude in Science“, the parable by Jorge Luis Borges & Adolfo Bioy Casares about the map that became the size of the territory it set out to survey. And of course, when a map gets this big, you’re going to have issues with organization.
How do we start reading something like this? I was forwarded a link to the blog itself – http://slacktivist.typepad.com – and found the top entry dealing with Left Behind. Not all of Slacktivist deals with Left Behind – but enough of it does that Mr. Clark has made a separate category for it, http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/left_behind. Clicking on that gets you a single page with all of the Left Behind posts, from newest to oldest. Being interested (and a fast reader) I decided to read the whole thing. To do this, you have to start at the bottom, scroll down a little bit (these are long posts), and then scroll up to get to the next chronological post. This does become, at length, tiring.
One point that’s important to remember here: the Left Behind component of Slacktivist differs from the majority of blogs in that its information is not especially time-sensitive. While there are references to ongoing current events (the Iraq war, for example, not without relevance to the text under discussion), these references don’t need to be read in real time. A reader could start reading his close reading at any time without much loss. (Granted, there is the question of relevance: it would be nice if in ten years nobody remembered Left Behind, but that probably won’t be the case: Clark points out Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth from the 1970s as prefiguring the series – and, it’s worth noting, it still sells frighteningly well.)
A further complication for the would-be reader: Mr. Clark’s posts, while they form the spine of his creation, are not the whole of it: his writing has attracted an enormous number of comments from his readers – somewhere over thirty comments for each of his recent posts, occasionally more than sixty. These comments, as you might expect, are all over the place – some are brilliant glosses, some are from confused Left Behind followers who have stumbled in, some declare the confused Left Behind followers to be idiots, and there’s the inevitable comment-spam, scourge of the blog-age. Some have fantastic archived conversations of their own. Some are referenced in later posts by Mr. Clark, and become part of the main text. It’s almost impossible to read all the comments because there are so many of them; it’s hard to tell from the “Comments (33)” link if the thirty-three comments are worth reading. It’s also much more difficult to read the comments chronologically: some older posts are still, a year later, generating comments, becoming weird zombie conversations.
What can be done to make this a more pleasant reading experience? Because blogs keep their entries in a database, it shouldn’t be that hard to make a front end webpage that displays the entries in chronological order. It also wouldn’t be hard to paginate the entries so that Mr. Clark’s more than 50,000 words are in more digestible chunks. I’m not sure what could be done about the comments, though. Seventy-five posts have generated 1738 comments, scattered in time. Here’s a rough diagram of how everything is connected:
The bottom row of blue dots represent Mr. Clark’s posts over time (from earliest to most recent). One post leads linearly to the next. The rows above represent comments: the first red row are comments on the first post (an arrow which leads to the first), which are frequent at first and then tail off. This pattern is followed by all the other comments on posts. Comments tend to influence following comments (although this isn’t necessarily true). But, unless you have eagle-eyed commentators who make sure to click on every comment link every day, different comment streams will probably not be influencing each other over time. The conversation has forked, and will continue forking.
A recent study seems to indicate that the success of a blog (as measured by advertising) is directly related to the feeling of community engendered, in no small part, by the ability to comment and discuss. But that ability to comment and discuss seems to get lost with time. What’s happening here might be an inherent limitation in the form of the blog: while they’re not strictly time-sensitive, they end up being that way. This could perhaps be changed if there were better ways into the archives, or if notifications were sent to the author and commentators on posts as new comments were posted. But: especially when dealing with an enormous volume of comments, as is the case at Slacktivist, the dialogue becomes increasingly asynchronous as time goes on.
We don’t think of physical books as having this problem because we assume that we can’t directly interact with the author and don’t expect to be able to do so. With electronic media, the boundaries are still unclear: we expect more.
useful fun with Technorati tags
You may have noticed a new line of metadata at the bottom of posts on if:book – Technorati tags. Technorati is perhaps the most dynamic blog-tracking site on the web, scanning over 10 million weblogs and ranking their authority according to the number of links they receive from around the blogosphere. Technorati tags are socially constructed classification terms – keywords or categories that authors apply to their entries so that they show up in Technorati searches. Taken together, these thousands of tags are what make up the Technorati folksonomy – a taxonomic system created by users from the bottom-up, instead of by an information architect (like a librarian) from the top-down. Folksonomies are less rigid than shelf-based hierarchies (see “the only group that can organize everything is everybody”). They can cope with subtle but crucial differences between synonyms like movies, films, flicks, and cinema – or devlish distinctions like art versus entertainment. Tags can help bloggers reach small niche areas of interest, trickling content down into the hard-to-reach corners. But being highly idiosyncratic, folksonomic tags tend to proliferate rapidly. Most are too obscure or particularly worded to become widely adopted points of reference. Right now, sites like Technorati or Flickr deal with this problem by ranking. The irony is that, for all the promise of personal expression through folksonomy, the tags that make it to the top of the pile tend to be pretty conventional. Less formal than a library catalogue, to be sure, but nothing terribly colorful (nuance fares better in personal bookmarking systems like del.icio.us). And again, we are struck with this problem, endemic on the web, of authority meaning simply who’s popular. In that regard, the web is still a lot like high school.
(Mechanics: we’re able to ping specific tags with the great Technorati Tag plugin for Movable Type)