“It’s the Links, Stupid”

“It’s The Links, Stupid.” Economist 20 Apr. 2006. 25 Feb. 2007
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(today’s date: 2/25/07)
http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6794172

summary
The Economist gives the 411 on blogs. Really, it’s just the basics, like why a blog’s style is so appealing and why reader/viewer comments are becoming essential to all sorts of media.

quotes

Today a new blog is created every second of every day, according to Technorati, a search engine for blogs, and the “blogosphere” is doubling in size every five months (see chart 1).

On average, Technorati tracks some 50,000 new posts an hour.

Some 60% of LiveJournal users are under 21 and female

only 1% of blogs are in German, according to Technorati, compared with 41% in Japanese, 28% in English and 14% in Chinese.

“Just as everybody has an e-mail account today, everybody will have a blog in five years,” says Mr Sabeer Bhatia

Review/Analysis

One especially helpful aspect of this article will be that it breaks down what amakes blogs, well, blogs. It breaks down the important components of a blog and explains what they are. Specifically, it explains blogrolls (other blogs the blogger reccommends), what’s in a post (text, hypertext, links, photos, videos), permalinks (the archive page at which you can find the blog), and trackbacks (these notify–ping–a blog about a new link from the outside; a “gossip-meter”). Dave Winer, who maintains the longest-running blog, says a certain appeal of blogs is that the writers are amateurs and don’t have to answer to editors, so their writing is often more raw and more “real.” This, in part, explains at least the initial popularity of blogs as a form of expressing oneself.

Six Apart is the company that runs LiveJournal, which is a bloggin site aimed specifically at the more personal, diary-type blogs. Mena Trott, who runs the company with her husband, says the wide teen usage is due to the fact that teens see email as a thing of the past, because why would you waste your time sending a thousand emails when you could just post it online? Or when you could just IM your friend instantly?

Conversations are key to blogs and are what’s drawing the attention of the older, more reluctant audience. Conversations are also key to a democratic society, as everyone deserves a voice. Blogs give people that voice, and they allow people to respond directly on an event. The popularity of blogs is proof in itself that, if you give people a voice, they will use it.