Refereed Article A1:

Impact of blogs and the blogosphere on various societies

05:02
2007, Dec

Nay Myo Aung
UNITEC, New Zealand
academic@naymyoaung.name

Aung, N. M. (2007). Impact of blogs and the blogosphere on various societies. Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology, 5(2). Retrieved January 14, 2012 from http://www.naccq.ac.nz/bacit/0502/2007Aung_Blogs.htm

Abstract

Blogs are personal thoughts and opinions published on the web periodically and usually presented in reverse chronological order. Blogs are also an evolution of peer-to-peer powered communication media such as newsgroups. They are however, much more user-friendly and more efficient than newsgroups for publishing and discussing issues. Thus, blogs have become one of the most widely used media to publish news and issues in the recent years. A blog is a more effective tool for communicating at the peer-to-peer level because unlike writing on walls or stones, it can reach millions of peer-users world-wide as long as they are connected to the Internet. There has been recent research analyzing the content of blogs to draw conclusions about user opinions with moderate success. The well-formed nature of blogs made it easy for these researchers to collect and analyze their contents. However, this feature of blogs often aids malicious use of blogs such as surveillance of bloggers based on their blogs. This article presents an academic review of blogs and the blogosphere and their impacts on various groups namely; general bloggers, journalists and publishers, government agencies, background detectives, blog software developers, businesses and advertisers. In this review, both positive and negative impacts on these stakeholders have been identified and presented.

Keywords

Blogs, blogosphere, search engine optimization, SEO, group dynamics

1. INTRODUCTION

Blogs are usually personal thoughts written by individuals periodically on their websites and presented in reverse chronological order (Bausch, Haughey, & Hourihan, 2002; Doctorow et al., 2002). Figure 1 displays a standard blog that contains an informational side bar consisting of blog information, keyword tags and archives. In the content area, it contains the date, blog title and the content of the blog (Doctorow et al., 2002).

Figure 1. Standard Blog Features (Adapted from Jensen, 2003)

• availability of tools,
• enough people getting online,
• blogs being seen as the next generation of newsgroups.

1.1 Availability of Tools

As tools to generate blogs become available (such as Google’s Blogger.com), average people can publish blogs online easily (Jensen, 2003; Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005). This is one of the main reasons that has made blogs one of the most powerful peer-powered online media (Jensen, 2003). Some people still use Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) to write blogs as they give the author more control over the content and appearance of the blogs (Nardi et al., 2004).

1.2 Enough People Getting Online

More people are getting online as broadband becomes more affordable in most countries (Savio, 2004). Since broadband is an “always on” type of connection, users can post new entries on their blogs more frequently as well as get updates from other people’s blogs and add comments more often.

1.3 Next Generation of Newsgroups

The blogosphere is a collection of blogs that link to (and from) each other to form one big inter-connected individualistic information store. Just like the Web, the blogosphere is an ever expanding universe of inter-connected blogs as shown in Figure 2 (Jensen 2003; Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005; Welch, 2003).

Figure 2. Sample Blogosphere Structure (Adapted from Jensen, 2003)

There are different types of links in the Blogosphere and ways in which blogs are inter-connected. They are:

• inbound,
• outbound,
• self-bound.

Inbound links are links from other blogs that are linked to a particular blog. Likewise, outbound links are links from a particular blog to other blogs. Some blogs link to other blog entries within the same blog and these are known as self-bound links ( Figure 2). There can be five different blog types in respect to linking:

• destination
• source
• destination and source
• isolated
• link to non-blog sources

Blogs that get linked to much more often than they link to other blogs can be classified as “Destination” blogs. Likewise, blogs that link to other blogs much more often than they get linked to can be classified as “Source” blogs. Blogs that get linked to often and have many links to other blogs can be classified as both “Destination” and “Source” blogs. There are also blogs that do not link to other blogs or have links from other blogs. These blogs are called “Isolated” blogs. Many isolated blogs link to or write up critique of non-blog sources such as online articles or TV news stories or other events.

2. HISTORY AND CLASSIFICATIONS

2.1 Early Blogs

Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common websites, involving "What's New" or "News" sections, often on the index page and sorted by date. However, there were no streamlined ways to easily publish these “news” or “updates” quickly enough. This is one of the things that blogs have streamlined; a way to publish information or updates on an event up-to-the-minute.

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz. He broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog in April or May of 1999 (Herring, Scheidt, Bonus, & Wright, 2004).

Amateur and professional journalists who uses blogs to publish news stories and events are sometimes called Escribitionists; a term coined for online journalists in 1999 (Carrington, 2006). It is a combination of the words “Exhibitionist” and “Scribe”.

2.2 Emergence of Different Blog Types

Based on Blood (2002), and Rainie, Fox and Fallows (2003), the following general classifications can be made with respect to content:

• gossip blog,
• link blog,
• moblog,
• warblog,
• vlog,
• business blog,
• cubbox.

'Gossip Blogs' are generally blogs that write about bloggers’ rumours, comments, feedbacks and views. Most blogs can be classified into this category as most information from blogs is anecdotal by nature.

'Link Blogs' are blogs that post about a new link to a website or an online article periodically. These blogs are usually done in link campaigns and online marketing. See below for more details.

'Moblog's are blogs published from mobile devices such as PDA and mobile phones. These blogs can be very short and can contain very recent, up-to-the-minute news or information as they can be written from any place and any time with a mobile device with Internet connection.

'Warblogs' are blogs that first appeared during the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. They are extremely political in nature and usually contained one-sided or prejudiced statements about events or people of opposing views.

'Vlog's are blogs that post a new video clip periodically and usually provide a commentary on it. Usually blogs are textual in nature and there are not many video blogs in the blogging community as they still take a while to download and view on the visitor’s computer.

'Business Blogs' are blogs that periodically provide business and stock exchange news. They are intended for business people and/or stock brokers who rely on updates of business news, stock prices and business organizational changes or rumours of changes.

'Cubboxe's are blogs that are mostly popular in Asia and involve users paying monthly fees to get blog space and post blogs.

2.3 Blogging, Politics and News

Since 2001, bloggers have blogged more on politics. One of the reasons for this could be because of the need for personal (or professional) opinions on issues such as 9/11 attacks, US-Afghan and US-Iraq invasion (Herring et al., 2004). Blogs can bring key information to public light, with mainstream media having to follow their lead (Rainie et al., 2003). Bloggers can provide up-to-the-minute news stories, before mainstream media follow and elaborate. Because of complex blogging tools and mobile computing being available, blogs can be published almost instantaneously as news happens.  Thus, more news can be published in a quicker way (Herring et al., 2004).

2.4 Reactive Blogs

Blogs often react to material already published by the mainstream media; Sometimes, it is the other way round. Some blogs do not initiate stories but rather comment on and critique the mainstream media. For example, people blog about whether they agree or disagree with certain media or reporters and why (Carrington, 2006; Welch, 2003).

2.5 Blogging Empowers Individuals

In the United States, blogging helped to create a political crisis that forced Senator Trent Lott (who had been making racial statements in his campaign) to step down as majority leader (Burkeman, 2002; Jensen, 2003). Since 2003, blogs on the Iraq war have emerged (Rainie et al., 2003). This is evidence that blogs can be as up-to-date as mainstream media, if not more. One blogger from Baghdad has a blog that deals with everyday life in Iraq , especially in war times. He has enough blog entries to be able to publish his blog as a book. Even more, he has acquired a movie deal (Grossman & Hamilton, 2004).

2.6 Recent Developments

Starting in 2004, more people are able to write blogs because more sophisticated yet easy to use blogging software has emerged. For example, vivid accounts of 2004 Tsunami victims are found mostly on blogs rather than on mainstream media (Choi, 2005). Blogs can uncover issues that mainstream media miss or hide intentionally (Williams, Trammell, Postelnicu, Landreville, & Martin, 2006). For example, the authenticity of documents critical of George W. Bush’s National Guard service was questioned by a person nicknamed “Buckhead” and other people started to link the issue, including a reporter named Matt Drudge. Drudge then produced the “Drudge Report” which was aired on CBS. After that, ABC disputed the credibility of the accusations causing something of a scandal (O’Neil, 2004).

In New Zealand, a blog claimed that Sam Morgan (who founded the New Zealand auction site Trademe) used infamous Internet advertising techniques such as spamming on Usenet newsgroups before TradeMe became well known (Bachtiar, 2006).

3. PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT

Carrington (2006) believes that people want to be heard, want to be noticed and more importantly, want to contribute knowledge to a larger society. Blogging gives individuals more power in terms of bringing an issue to public attention (Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005). Nardi et al. (2004) noted from their research that people write blogs for following non-exclusive reasons:

• update others on activities and whereabouts,
• express opinions to influence others,
• seek others’ opinions and feedback,
• “think by writing”,
• release emotional tension.

Blogs can keep a news story from “expiring” (Burkeman, 2002). Peer bloggers can periodically refresh an issue that has been a victim of mainstream media’s censorship (Williams et al., 2006). In addition, blogs can add more credibility about stories as told by peer users rather than by mainstream media (Kurashima et al., 2005; Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005). Furthermore, blogging has made updating a site and linking to other sites much easier so that an issue can be brought up and spread through individuals more quickly (Carrington, 2006). The author of this paper believes that blogs are an evolutionary peer-powered mass media, which is a step-up from current peer-to-peer communication technologies such as Newsgroups, List servers and Forums.

Figure 3 shows a scene from the motion picture “Rita Haywood and The Shawshank Redemption” (Darabont & King, 1994). This is the picture showing that Brooks (a prisoner released from parole) wrote on the ceiling that “he was here” before leaving the place. What he was trying to do was communicate that he was here to his fellow prisoners who may one day get paroled like himself and may stay in this house. Possibly he hoped for a peer-to-peer communication to occur. This is in essence, very similar to people writing blogs on the Internet and hoping that other people “discover” and learn their stories.

Figure 3. A scene from the film: Rita Haywood and the Shawshank Redemption (Darabont & King, 1994)

One of the key philosophies of blogs is about peer-to-peer information distribution; it fulfils people’s need to spread the word among their peers; the need to communicate the un-communicable, across boundaries and bureaucracies, the need to contribute to the society and last but certainly not the least, the need to make history.

This idea of writing on objects can be traced as far as the Stone Age. Blogs shares the same principle with them; it is about making history, the history as we should remember it and not how somebody else wants us to remember it. However, one must be careful when making statements in a public place like the Internet since they can be read by anybody. The largely textual nature of the Internet and blogs can cause someone to misinterpret the blog post as defamatory or even as a challenge. Thus, some people would not write anything political in their blog or would create a new blog with some pseudonym to write political and controversial statements (Nardi et al., 2004). Nardi et al. (2004) noted that some people maintain two sections in their blogs: one public and one private where public users cannot access.

4. CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

4.1 Blog Feed Formats

There are currently two syndication feed formats; Real Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom (AtomEnabled, 2006; UserLand, 2006) . RSS was created by Dan Libby of Netscape and Atom was a branching development of RSS (Sayre, 2005). Atom was created to address “missing” features of RSS and to be a more fully-featured and capable version of RSS. However RSS developers disagree and one of their reasons is to keep the syndication format as simple as a list of updates, nothing fancy; hence the name Real Simple Syndication (Sayre, 2005).

Figure 4. Sample XML document (Adapted from Abiteboul, Buneman, & Suciu, 1999)

SS is an application of XML. Thus, it applies the XML qualities such as well-formedness and predictable schematics (Hammersley, 2005). For instance, an RSS document can contain a collection of information such as Title, Description and Link of each article, which can be easily read by software agents (Hammersley, 2005). When blogs provide RSS, search engines (such as Google) can more properly index the articles and links and this gives people opportunity to “Google Bomb” (which will be explained in next sub-section). This also leads to another application that allows software and spy agents (such as ECHELON) to automatically collect a large amount of individual information quite easily (as opposed to collecting voice data from phones or reading out-of-context email messages and faxes). Researchers can also use this advantage to collect research data about blogs for academic purposes.

4.2 Google Bombing

One of the many ways Google ranks a web page (using PageRank) is by counting how many links on the web point to that particular web page (Couvering, 2004; Walker, 2002). Generally speaking, the more links to that page, the higher the page rank. Google bombing is a “hack” that can be made by a large group of users who have the ability to write web pages. This is made even easier when using blogs and blog software, which allow non-technical people to write on the web. These users can put up a link to a particular site with specific words. For instance, in 2004 a handful of users linked to President George W. Bush’s profile page using the word “Miserable Failure”, which resulted that page being displayed when somebody searches for “Miserable Failure” ( Figure 5).

Figure 5. An illustration of Google bombing (Adapted from BBC News, 2003;, Couvering, 2004; Walker, 2002)

Applications emerged that “uses” the “Google Bombing” method described earlier, such as “PayPerPost.com”. This type of services allows people who want to advertise on the web to solicit people who write and maintain blogs on regular basis to place their ads. Bloggers get paid for ads appearing on their blogs and advertisers can place their ads in a more relevant and focused context. See Figure 6 for a screenshot of PayPerPost

Figure 6. Home page of PayPerPost.com as of Sunday, November 12, 2006

Google implemented a counter measure to reduce the Google bombing hack, by adding an attribute “rel” with the value “nofollow” to links that are placed in blogs comments (Mishne, Carmel, & Lempel, 2005). This way when the Google page crawler encounters a link with this specific attribute, it will not count as a “vote”. This is done primarily to prevent spammers putting up links to their products in the “comments” section of the blogs. Thus, users can still uses Google bombing in blogs to create a situation such as the “Miserable Failure” case.

5. RECENT RESEARCH

5.1 Genre Analysis

Herring et al. (2004) came up with a model that can identify the genres of blogs. They classified the blogs into four different domains, Personal, Community, Individual and Topical. Blogs that fall into the Personal and Individual domains include online diaries or journals while blogs that fall more into the Community domain include support groups. Topical blogs include enhanced columns or journalists’ periodic publications. Blogs that tend to be Topical and Community centred include blogs with collaborative content.One research discovered that blogs are still very short and they are usually linked less often to one another. It was found that there were more blogs written on their own than linked to or referred to another blog.

5.2 Opinion Analysis

Research conducted by Heckel and Ward (2005) used RSS feeds to collect data on political blogs and analyzed the content in them to classify their political opinions. However, their project was unsuccessful due to their algorithm being unable to deal with the ambiguity of words and sentences used by human. (Heckel & Ward, 2005)

Kurashima et al. (2005) have done research involving the analysis of Japanese users’ experience of travelling in places all over the world. They tried to gather actual experiences of users of a related time and place. They utilized RSS as an aid to mine data of blog’s date, title, content, location and other metadata information about blogs. After they collected the data, they visualized the data in a “heat-map” like format. However, this system is not without room for improvement. Kurashima et al. (2005) explained that they currently could not identify synonyms or disambiguate other ambiguous words and sentence structures found in blogs.

5.3 The ‘We Feel Fine’ Project

6. STAKEHOLDERS AND THEIR VIEWS

This section describes the stakeholders of blogs, various blogging-related activities and views and problems that arise for each stakeholder and discusses possible solutions and/or workarounds. For any research or study, it is important to identify stakeholders so that all the requirements and needs of all the stakeholders in relation to the subject are addressed in the study. The following social groups have been identified as stakeholders of blogs and blogging and general:

• general Blogging community,
• journalists and publishers,
• government agencies,
• background detectives,
• blog software developers,
• search engines,
• businesses,
• advertisers,

6.1 General Blogging Community

The general blogging community contains people who write blogs, people who are being written about and people who read blogs. They are the most common stakeholders for blogs. The following sections explain each of these stakeholders in detail.

6.2 People Who Write Blogs

People who write blogs maybe emotionally relieved to express their views to a large, world-wide audience (Nardi et al., 2004). However, blogs are like boomerangs, what bloggers wrote may one day come back and haunt them (Nardi et al., 2004).

6.3 People Who Are Being Written About

People who are being written about maybe shocked to see criticism of themselves (often defamatory in nature) to a large, world-wide audience (Nardi et al., 2004). Sometimes they don’t even know they are being written about and make “surprise discoveries” when using search engines.

6.4 People Who Read Blogs

People who subscribe to and read blogs may be entertained to read blogs as personal news gossip and information that is coming from peer-level rather than mainstream media (Hammersley, 2005). However, people should be careful when reading blogs as sometimes it will be hard to judge the validity of the content of the blog as it can be written by anybody. Blogs should be used as one of the many resources when doing research on a particular topic, as a complementary resource rather than the main authoritative resource. The judgement of validity also depends on the authorship of the blog as there are authoritative authors writing blogs (Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005).

6.5 Journalists and Publishers

Some publishers are amateusr and some are de facto journalists (Knowledge.Wharton, 2005). For any of them, blogs make it easier to publish online and make revenue from advertising channels (Knowledge.Wharton, 2005). Some of the journalists work in conjunction with mainstream media such as The New York Times and ABC and others are freelance professional journalists writing columns in the blogs (Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005). Academic publishers welcome formats such as RSS that are good to use for citations (Hammond, Hannay, & Lund, 2004).

6.6 Government Agencies

For government agencies around the world, a new technology is often a “new security challenge or risk”, especially a technology that enables easy-exchange of information between peer-citizens. Blogs will be no doubt one of the technologies that governments around the world will want to be watching closely. With blogs and blogging tools (such as RSS), it is easier for anyone to “tag” a person and track that person’s writings and viewings of blogs (Kurashima et al., 2005). Thus blogs can aid some serious surveillance activity.

6.7 Background Detectives

Just as government agencies can “tag” a person and track that person’s writings and viewings of blogs, private or freelance detectives can use the web to search for a person’s writings and records if he/she maintains a blog on a regular basis, and possibly form prejudice about the authors. This “background-check” is usually done before doing any kind of business or offering employment in order to make sure the person in question is “of good character”. The author of this paper believes that this is ethically questionable but then again, blogs are published in the public domain. Therefore, the blog publisher who publishes private or controversial statements in a public part of the Internet does so at their own risk. For this reason, some people do not write controversial statements in their blogs (or maintain separate blogs for them) (Nardi et al., 2004). In this case, blog writers can maintain a “good” public image while still being able to write private and controversial statements which can be read by only limited number of trusted friends or family.

6.8 Blog Software Developers

Since blogging is relatively new, this gives a new area for software companies and developers alike to develop software and make revenue out of it. There are some free blogging tools as well as commerical blogging tools currently available from various software companies for different blogging needs.

6.9 Search Engine Developers

New types of search engines (specifically for blogs) such as Technorati and Feedster have emerged (Kirkpatrick & Roth, 2005). These search engines differ from traditional search engines in that they search only on blogs. Furthermore, they have specialized blog searching functionalities (which are currently absent in other web search engines) such as how many people are subscribed to a blog or how popular is a blog by tracking the number of subscribers and views (Lawson-Borders & Kirk, 2005). This means that existing search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN have to keep up with the changes in respect to searching blogs.

6.10 Businesses

Businesses from various industries (especially those doing business with IT) can use blogs to keep their customers updated as well as make announcements. For example, they can uses blogs to make announcements of the launching of a new product or an event (Knowledge.Wharton, 2005). They can also maintain blogs to make new job positions announcements and people who are interested in working at their company can subscribe to their job blog and be instantly notified. However, businesses should be concerned about people commenting on their products and services using blogs. Apart from making sure their customers are happy there can be people who deliberately write negative things about the company to defame its products and services. Negative or otherwise, businesses should be concerned because people usually give blogs more credibility over other mainstream media and businesses are vulnerable to possible misuse of blogs which could destroy the company’s image (Kirkpatrick & Roth, 2005).

6.11 Advertisers

Advertisers can cooperate with publishers and bloggers to advertise on their blogs. This gives advertisers a new channel to advertise on (Knowledge.Wharton, 2005). Services such as PayPerPost.com can get bloggers to choose the advertisements that are related to the subject of their blogs and give advertisers opportunities to advertise to a more targeted and relevant audience. Other advertising services such as Google AdSense (http://www.google.com/adsense) can actually scan contents of the blog and display relevant advertisements on blogs and blog publishers can even make it so that the advertisement colours blend into their blog. Since these types of advertisements are relevant and targeted to the seemingly correct audience, it could become a more cost-effective and efficient medium to advertise for advertisers compared to TV or Radio advertising.

7. CONCLUSION

Blogs are usually personal thoughts, opinions and views written by individuals periodically on their websites and presented in reverse chronological order. Before the emergence of blogs, updates on “news” sections or home page of websites have been used and they are early forms of blogs. However, blogs streamlined the process of publishing up-to-the-minute news and issues on the web.

Blogs are an evolution of other communication media such as newsgroups. However, blogs are much more user-friendly and efficient than other peer-to-peer communication tools such as newsgroups for publishing and discussing issues. Thus, blogs have become the most widely used medium to publish news and issues in recent years.

In philosophical context, people write blogs to be heard and to communicate the un-communicable. This is the same reason as people writing on the walls or writing on stones in the Stone Age to communicate amongst their peers. Blogs provide a better way for communicating at the peer-to-peer level because unlike writing on walls or stones, blogs can reach millions of peer-users world-wide as long as they are connected to the Internet.

In contemporary context, blogs are used as an online marketing tool to optimize the ranking of search engine results by many bloggers cooperating to blog the same content and links. There have been abuses of this feature of blogs in order to make political statements such as President George W. Bush’s home page being displayed when searching for “miserable failure”.

There are people who write blogs, who are being written about and who subscribe to blogs. Usually, people who write blogs are relieved to express their feelings and views to people all over the world while people who are being written about will often be shocked to discover blogs written about them. People who subscribe to blogs will be both informed and entertained to read latest news and stories from different providers.

Usually, blogs are well-formed and provide an XML feed such as RSS or Atom which Internet users can subscribe to in order to get the updates on a particular blog. The well-formed nature of blogs often aids government agencies and background detectives to make malicious use of blogs, such as for surveillance of bloggers. Furthermore, it also aids academic researchers who want carry out research that revolves around content-analysis of blogs. However, recent researches done on content analysis of blogs to draw conclusions on user opinions were only moderately successful.

Software developers have to keep up with the change on blogs so that they can create better and more efficient blogging tools. There are currently free and commercial blogging tools available but there is still room for improvement. Businesses from many different industries can use blogs as a means to keep their existing and potential customers up-to-date about the product and services they provide. However, they also need to keep an eye out for users defaming their company, products and services using blogs.

Advertisers can cooperate with publishers and bloggers to advertise on their blogs which allows advertisers to advertise to a more controlled and targeted audience for maximum success rate. There are third-party online advertising services that aid blogs such as PayPerPost.com and Google AdSense. This correctly-targeted form of advertising could become a more cost-effective and efficient medium to advertise compared to TV or Radio advertising. For journalists and publishers, blogs provide a cost-effective medium to publish the news and stories to world-wide audiences. They can then generate revenue relatively easily from advertising on their blogs.

In conclusion, blogs are an evolutionary peer-to-peer powered communication medium. Blogs can be used by many different people and professions with different outcomes. Ultimately, blogs aids peer-to-peer, opinionated communication to occur easily and thus their impact and importance is likely to be studied for years to come.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank my professor, Dr. Donald Joyce for helping me publish this paper.

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Williams, A. P., Trammell, K. d., Postelnicu, M., Landreville, K. d., & Martin, J. d. (2006). Blogging and hyperlinking: Use of the Web to enhance viability during the 2004 US campaign. Journalism Studies, 6(2), 177-186.

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