Gone To the Blogs

"We don't know exactly how many there are. But they number in the tens of thousands. They are everywhere among us. They intend to tear down the world as we know it...."

Those might sound like the opening lines to a trashy Triffids novel or a Rumsfeld rant about mad mullahs threatening the USA -- but Jonah Goldberg in the Washington Times is in fact writing about blogs.

You know blogs: personal, self-made websites where Anyman (or Anywoman) comments about the news, links to other sites or posts pictures of their pets. Weblogs, to give them their full techie name, have been around since the mid-1990s, and now they're everywhere. According to CNN, "Several sources put the total number of blogs in the range of 200,000 to 500,000". Blogger.com, which provides idiot-proof software for setting up your own weblog, claims that 1000 blogs are created on its site every day.

Most blogs have a dozen or so readers, but a handful have built up audiences in their thousands. There are news blogs, comment blogs, war blogs, diet blogs, disease blogs, cat blogs, dog blogs, blogs about blogs. There's even a "homeless guy" blog, written by a fortysomething man who lives on the streets of Nashville, Tennessee. "All human life is there," said the UK Guardian in a feature about the "blogging phenomenon."

The vast majority of the estimated 200,000 to 500,000 blogs are little more than online diaries, where individuals post musings and write about their daily experiences. But there is a growing number of "big bloggers" -- bloggers who write about news, politics and culture -- who claim to be forging new forms of journalism and correspondence.

Apparently, such blogs threaten the traditional media's hold over the spread of information and ideas. By allowing the man in the street to get his hands on the means of production -- to write, produce and publish his own content without needing an editor or publisher -- blogging has been hailed as a "publishing revolution," which will "transform journalism" and "democratise the media."

Glenn Reynolds, an American law professor who runs the hugely popular weblog InstaPundit, claims 2003 will be the "year of the blog." "For Big Media," says Reynolds, "[blogging] is going to produce an increasing degree of either conscientiousness or paranoia, as it becomes apparent that the megaphone now works both ways..."

For Andrew Sullivan -- British-journo-in-America, Sunday Times columnist and big into blogging -- there has been nothing less than a "blogging revolution." "Blogging is changing the media world and could, I think, foment a revolution in how journalism functions in our culture," says Sullivan. He goes so far as to argue that blogging might represent "a publishing revolution more profound than anything since the printing press." Wow.

So is the "blogosphere" making the crusty publishers of yesteryear obsolete? Is the spread of personal websites on a par with the birth of print? Not quite. Blogging may be fun -- which is why I've been publishing one at brendanoneill.net for the past six months; it may even be a new and exciting way of using the web. But it's not journalism, and it ain't no revolution.

For all the claims that the "big bloggers" are challenging the traditionalists, in fact many blogs simply leech off the old-style media. The political and comment blogs that are seen as being at the forefront of the "blogging revolution" often do little more than write about and react to articles published in traditional media outlets (or "the Big Media" as they call it), rather than generating new journalistic content.

Two of the things that bloggers became famous for in 2002 were "Fisking" and the "fact-checking of asses" (seriously -- as in "Blogs: fact-checking Big Media's ass"). Fisking is named after the Independent's left-leaning foreign correspondent Robert Fisk, who is despised by many right-wing bloggers for what they perceive to be his anti-American attitudes and especially for his critical comments about Israel. According to one "Blogging Glossary," published on a libertarian weblog, to Fisk is to "deconstruct an article on a point by point basis in a highly critical manner."