True confessions of a North Lake blogger

Sometimes, when I tell people what I do, they look at me, stupefied. Other times, I get the slightest bit of recognition, but it is always followed quickly by a head shake while they mutter, “I just don’t know why anyone would want to spend that much time doing that.” After a while, you get used to confronting these sorts of responses. You stop trying to defend your reasons for doing it and wear it like a badge of honor.

I am a blogger.

What is a blog?

By now, most of you have heard the word ‘blog.’ In the past year, it has become part of the vernacular, especially in America, where bloggers have begun to assert their influence in arenas as wide as music and television to journalism and politics.

According to Duncan Riley, writer of Blogherald.com, ‘blog’ first surfaced in 1995, presented at a business seminar and entitled, “Exploiting the World-Wide Web for Electronic Meeting Document Analysis and Management.”

“Blog” is a shortened version of “web log.” Defining what a blog is provides a more difficult challenge, however. Try typing the phrase “define: blog” into your Google search, and you’ll come up with almost 30 different definitions for the word.

The general consensus, however, is this: A blog is a Web page updated frequently with short posts on various subjects, which are then arranged chronologically with newer content appearing at the top.

It’s an open-ended definition to be sure, but it is vague for a reason. Blogs cover too many subjects to easily categorize them as a whole.

There are blogs devoted to varied subjects like music, politics, television and motherhood. Academic and medical blogs allow professors and doctors to discuss issues which are confronting them in their field in a less strict environment than they are used to. There are even entire blogs devoted to knitting.

Dave Sifry, creator of the Web site Technorati.com, which has become the largest blog search engine, said last month that the number of blogs created is increasing at an exponential rate.

“We currently track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day,” said Sifry, “which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day — and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting three months after their blogs are created.”

Why do people blog?

So, why do so many people, like myself, decide to jump on the growing bandwagon and create their own blogs? When I created my blog, I thought it would be an interesting and easy way to write about the things I cared about. At the time, in July of 2004, I never even considered that anyone would be interested in the things I wrote, much less come back to read them again. Today, I get roughly 300 “hits” a day. Some blogs like DailyKos.com, the most trafficked political Web site on the Internet, was founded by Markos Zuniga as a way to rant about his political views. It receives an average of more than 500,000 hits a day.

But traffic, though often used as an indicator of the success of a blog, isn’t the most attractive part about blogging. For amateur writers, blogging provides a medium for their writing. This medium is unique, however, because it talks back. Readers come across a blog and they leave comments. As that feedback continues, a network of friends who have real discussions begins to emerge. “It’s a chance to share everyday thoughts with like-minded and interesting people and participate in conversation,” said Beth Young, author of the blog iBeth.org. “I look to blogs for what they’re good at – personal commentary and experience.”

Why should I care?

Blogs are proving themselves a force to be reckoned with. In September 2004, the CBS Evening News ran a story about President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. The story claimed to have new memos proving that the President had never completed his National Guard service and had, in fact, gone AWOL. Such a story would be extremely damaging to the president, who was then running for re-election.

Blogs like Powerline.com, a conservative political blog, began to look into the claims, and found something fishy with the memos themselves. John Hinderaker of Powerline.com enlisted the help of his thousands of readers. “A virtual think-tank was born,” said Hinderaker. “Forty-seven posts later, a person who called himself ‘Buckhead’ offered the proposition that he thought the documents were forgeries.”

Among Powerline’s many readers, there were some who were experts at typesetting. Those experts were able to establish that the font used in the memos didn’t exist until years after the date the memos were printed. The memos were forgeries. As a result, CBS forced their long-time anchor, Dan Rather, to resign and George Bush won re-election.

As more and more people begin to blog, the collective levels of expertise in the blogosphere continues to grow. Blogging is no longer about keeping an online diary for your friends to read. A sort of citizen’s media has begun to emerge, with writers insisting that the subjects they feel are important find a voice.

The national conversation used to occur around the office watercooler. Thanks to the Internet, the watercooler just got a little bigger. The only way to join in is to log on.
Next month: Creating and maintaining your own blog.

— Dylan Biles, an NLC student majoring in journalism, is the author of his own blog, Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane, at http://srwu.net.