The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Weblogs — "Tripe-Writing" On The Increase? Monika Merkes monika@melbpc.org.au |
Thanks to the World Wide Web everybody can be a poet, an author, a journalist, a preacher, a political or sports commentator and share their daily musings with the rest of the world. And many people do so. It has been estimated that there are up to half a million blogs on the World Wide Web. A weblog, or blog, is a Web site or single Web page that is updated frequently, often daily, and posts are in chronological order, similar to a diary. Usually, a blog contains links to other Web sites.
While some blog writers (bloggers) focus on specific issues, such as music, politics, sport or IT news, others just whinge. The topic "boredom" seems to be popular with adolescent bloggers: A search on Google with the keywords "blogs AND bored OR boredom" found 77,800 entries. Other people use their blogs as therapy. "Smelly Melly" http://smelanie.snarl-hum.org/gm/index.html describes her blog with the following words: "Read my thoughts, views, ideas and problems. This site is my therapist... This is who I am. Please respect that."
So why would anybody be bothered to read about a blogger's "tripe-writing" http://www.tripewriting.org/, his or her sister's birthday party, their cholesterol level, nightmares, the clothes they wore yesterday, or their shopping habits?
Some blogs have large followings. According to the New York Times (10 August 2002), the journalist Andrew Sullivan, http://www.andrewsullivan.com/, and Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee http://www.instapundit.com/, routinely draw more than 20,000 visitors a day and are cited by the mainstream press. The corporate world has also started to take blogs seriously. For example, the UK's newspaper the Guardian has its own blog, described as "our pick of the best journalism from around the web" http://www.guardian.co.uk/weblog/. Further, the Guardian recently awarded Alistair Coleman's blog ScaryDuck http://www.scaryduck.blogspot.com the title of Best British Blog 2002 and the prize of œ1,000. Even John Howard has his own blog http://johnhoward.blogspot.com/ well, this blog is not officially authorised by Australia's Prime Minister.
Blogs have been around for several years, but appear to have become more popular recently. Dave Winer claims that his Scripting News weblog http://www.scripting.com/ is one of the earliest (February 1996) and is currently the longest-running weblog on the Internet. Blogs are now the subject of media studies and conference papers. While they have a notable presence on the Internet, most are just trivial and dull. Plenty to choose from for the Anti-Bloggies awards http://www.antibloggies.com/.
| Other URLs: The MetaFilter Network, a community of bloggers http://www.metafilter.com/ blogdex, an index of blogs http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ Weblogs.com, a web application, contains a list of blogs that have changed in the last three hours http://www.weblogs.com/ Blogger, one of the early commercial sites http://www.blogger.com Christina Wodtke, Archives for User Centered Design http://www.eleganthack.com/archives/cat_user_centered_design.html Blogstickers, "a kind of community museum for stickers that you put on your weblogs" http://www.blogstickers.com/ Microcontent News, review of various blogging software http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/blogware.htm Just Blog It, overview of blogging resources http://www.zdnet.com.au/builder/program/web/story/0,2000034810,20267672,00.htm UK Environment, a collaborative weblog http://www.ukenvironment.org/ Break of Day in the Trenches. - Thesis Notes and Great War Classes http://www.whatalovelywar.co.uk/war/ How Weblogs Influence A Billion Google Searches A Week. By John Hiler http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googleblogs.htm Australian Weblogs http://australian.weblogs.com/ grumpy girl Urban Cowgirl, Sydney Meg Hourihan, co-author of the book "We
Blog: Publishing online with Weblogs" |
Reprinted from the November 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
