Blogosphere
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Blogosphere (alternate: blogsphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs; blogs as a community; blogs as a social network. Weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture.
Blogosphere is an essential concept for blogs. Blogs themselves are just web formats, whereas the blogosphere is a social phenomenon. What really differentiates blogs from webpages or forums or chatrooms is that blogs are designed from the outset to be part of that shifting Internet-wide social network.
Like any other biological system, the blogosphere demonstrates all the classic ecological patterns: predators and prey, evolution and emergence, natural selection and adaptation. The number of links obtained by a blog, is frequently related to the quality and quantity of information presented by that blog. That means, the most popular blogs have the highest link level, the worst blogs have the lowest link level. The blog ecosystem has its own selection and adaptation mechanism. The good tends to become better, the bad tends to disappear.
Through links and commentaries, the blogosphere with its self-perfecting mechanism, converts itself from a personal publishing system into a collaborative publishing system.
Sites such as Technorati [1] (http://www.technorati.com), Blogdex [2] (http://blogdex.net), Blogrunner [3] (http://www.blogrunner.com), Blog Street [4] (http://www.blogstreet.com) and Truth Laid Bear [5] (http://www.truthlaidbear.com) use the links made by bloggers to track the interconnections between bloggers. Taking advantage of hypertext links which act as markers for the subjects the bloggers are discussing, these sites can follow a piece of conversation as it moves from blog to blog. These also can help information researchers like MIT Media Lab study new communication technologies.
Weblogs tend to be about a variety of subjects. The form weblogs can take ranges from a simple list of personal links to diary-style. From the beginning, many weblogs have dealt with current events and politics.
Within business circles there is a particular focus on influentials and other forms of early adopter. The challenges of using blogging as a medium for advertising have been covered by Fortune magazine and Forbes magazine. Tools have been developed to track how fast a meme spreads through the blogsphere, in order to track which sites are the most important for gaining early recognition.
The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. [6] (http://www.bradlands.com/weblog/1999-09.shtml) It was re-coined in 2001 by William Quick [7] (http://www.dailypundit.com/) (quite seriously) and was quickly adopted and promulgated by the warblog community.
The term bears a similarity to a much older word: "logosphere". In the Greek roots, "logo" means word, and "sphere" can be interpreted as "world", resulting in "the world of words", the universe of discourse. The term also recalls the pronunciation and the meaning of the term "noosphere".
See also
External links
- Blog Herald (http://www.blogherald.com)
- Blogdex (http://www.blogdex.net)
- Blogdigger (http://www.blogdigger.com)
- Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com)
- BlogPulse (http://www.blogpulse.com)
- Blogrunner (http://www.blogrunner.com)
- blogsnow (http://www.blogsnow.com)
- Blogwise (http://www.blogwise.com)
- Feedster (http://www.feedster.com)
- Plazoo (http://www.plazoo.com)
- PubSub (http://www.pubsub.com)
- Technorati (http://www.technorati.com)
- The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem (http://www.truthlaidbear.com/ecosystem.php)
- Article on growth of the blogosphere. (http://www.clickz.com/stats/sectors/traffic_patterns/article.php/3438891)
- Article on overrating of blogosphere (http://www.slimindustries.com/blogorated/)
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