David Akin

How big is blogging?

In my post below [Jul 28 - The False Promise of the Blogosphere], I referred to the relatively small number of all Internet users who blog. Ran across the Blogcount site today which has some info about that. Blogcount says that earlier this summer, they figured there were about 2.9 million active Weblogs. That's a good chunk but the United Nations estimates that there are 600 million active Internet users around the world.

So proportion of Internet users who blog: 0.0048 per cent of all Internet users.

Mind you: Bloggers are a very noisy and frequently influential 0.0048 per cent but perhaps those who love to rave about how revolutionary blogs are ought to keep all this in mind. Much has been made, of course, of the fact that AOL is about to give all its members blog tools. Even if AOL's 30 million members all began blogging, we'd still be up to just 0.055 per cent of all Internet users.

Don't get me wrong: The blogosphere is way cool and is growing rapidly. I just don't think it's the overnight sensation it's biggest backers think it might be.

Pet Peeves, Pt. I

People are on vacation at this time of year and that means long, long voice-mail messages telling you who to call and what to do until the person you are calling is back at work. But here's a hint: When you're leaving those long voice-mail messages with specific instructions about who to call in your absence and what their phone number is -- SLOW DOWN and parlez plus lentement! Remember, when you're leaving a phone number on your voice-mail, the person listening to that message is trying to scribble it down. Already this morning, I've had to call two people who are not in the office three times so I could get all the information they left in their voice-mail message! So there you have it: Pet Peeve number 1 (of what will likely be a continuing series): People who talk way too fast on their voice-mail messages.

The False Promise of the Blogosphere

My friend and blog pioneer Michael O'Connor Clarke posted something to his blog which seems to have helped gel some thoughts or reactions to what I would call the general tone of self-importance that many top-name bloggers seem to have about their activity. You've probably seen these sorts of meditations: Blogging is revolutionary not evolutionary; blogging will turn Big Media on its ear; blogs and derivatives like moblogs are changing the way news is gathered and reported; and so on and so on. Here's a typical example of this kind of bloggerah-rah from Josh Quittner, who ought to know better.

Of course, the numbers on blogging are kind of silly. Of all those who use the Internet regularly, less than a few per cent actually blog and only a slightly greater number read those blogs. To most people -- and when I say most here, I don't mean 50 per cent plus one, I mean 90 per cent plus five -- the importance of blogging is not an issue because they haven't a clue what blogging is all about. (I can't quickly find an online source with the numbers to back up this statement but, since this is a blog and no editor is around to tell me otherwise, I'll leave it to you, to e-mail me some stats. I do know a press release crossed my desk within the last couple of months from a reputable organization which said just about as much.> Still, that few per cent adds up to lots of real people, so much so that Big Media has been saying, for years now, it seems, that blogging will be the Next Big Thing.


Michael's post -- the one that got me going here -- was a comment about something Jeff Jarvis wrote/whined about at his blog Buzz Machine about how Jeff and an editor of an academic journal couldn't get along. For Jeff and Michael, this is all about, as Michael put it, the journalism vs. blogging debate. Michael suggested that blogs are important because they help put some filters on news and, as a result, help us arrive at our own "balanced, informed, POV." To which I say, fair enough, but:

Michael --

With all affection, you're missing the point here. It is not -- in the big scheme of things -- important to keep filters on; it is important, in fact, to turn all filters off and to seek out alternative viewpoints and world views. If you subscribe to The Nation, go watch Fox News for an hour a day. There may indeed be a Joshua Marshall for every Aaron Brown but how many Aaron Brown watchers actually seek out the work of Joshua Marshall? How many of the soi-disant media sophisticates who read Josh Marshall's site actually watch Aaron Brown's show?
The lousy thing about the Blogosphere is that it reinforces world views. Take a look at your Blog Roll or the Blog Roll of anyone on your Blog Roll. Chances are we all vote the same way and have the same socio-ethic principles. Now, the mass media -- Big Media -- is the very place where you'll run into louts you would never honour with a spot on the Blog Roll. Big Media is where democracy is happening. Big Media is free in a shop window; Big Media is handout paper in a subway; Big Media is a few bucks for a transistor radio that can pull in the info-signals of an organization with the resources to put reporters around the globe and ask them to describe what's going on. Big Media is the place where we meet the idiots, the heroes, the fascists, the communists, the middle class, the graduating class, the jocks, the jerks and the jobless.
The Blogosphere is for the cool kids. It's where the elites meet. The Blogosphere is not a democracy; it is a paternalistic bully. It costs money -- and lots of it -- to play in the Blogosphere. The Blogosphere is the place where we find a lot of well-educated, mostly-white, Western liberal men (and I'm not to blind to realize I've just described myself) who believe they're changing the world because once, one of the thousands of those who are blogging, broke a story.

- Cheers!

To which I might add, many confuse journalism and blogging, either equating the two or comparing them against the other, because, to the news consumer, they may look similar. A blogger is giving me first-hand reports as Baghdad is being shelled and so is a reporter for CNN. The reporter from CNN is a journalist, ergo, the blogger in Baghdad must be a journalist. Er, not quite.
The output of a blog and the output of a journalist may, indeed, be similar but they are not the same thing nor, really, is it fair to compare them in a meaningful way.
Journalism, unlike blogging, is a process and a system that involves more than one individual. Journalism must be done by a writer, an editor, a researcher, a publisher, and a host of others. This is coming to you, dear Blog reader, straight from me unmediated by an editor. Hurrah for that ! But wouldn't you, dear Blog reader, have appreciated an editor's presence to reduce the number of typographical errors I've made in this post? Wouldn't an editor have challenged some of the logical leaps I've made here and asked me to more clearly explain myself? Best of all, wouldn't an editor have sat me down and steered me towards a more profitable use of an hour of my time if an editor could convince me that no one actually cared what I had to say on this topic?
Blogs have no such system -- and this is both their strength and their weakness or, put it in a more neutral way, one of the genre's defining characteristics vis a vis the many other ways humans communicate.

The Book Lady of Basra

The New York Times today has a terrific story about a 50-year-old librarian in Basra who, rather than steal the furniture and carpets from her institution like others did after the recent war, she did all she could to save the collection. She spirited 30,000 books out of the Basra library, hiding as many as she could at home. Neighbours and local shopkeepers pitched in, too, helping her haul all those books over a 7-foot wall around the library to safety.

News? What news?

A friend asked me last week why I hadn't blogged something in a while. "No news," I replied, "and nothing to say." I'd taken some holiday time over the last couple of weeks and when I was at work, I've had my head down on the latest daily deadline stuff, be it earnings news for the companies I cover for The Globe or stuff like the threat of a nationwide postal strike for CTV. In between all that regular writing -- and I figured once I probably write about 2,000 words a day, at least, between e-mail, articles, and notes for other things -- there wasn't anything I could think of that would have been 'unique' enough to post to my blog. I like the idea of a blog being a personal journal and all that but I think what distinguishes the King Blogs from all the others is that the Kings have something unique and universal to say. It's unique in the sense that the commentary or collection of links are given enough new context by the King Blogger so as to be a unique thought that advances the discussion of a particular topic or initiates discussion on a new one. When I say they're universal, the 'uniqueness' is presented in such a way that the blog is of interest to lots of people. In other words, it has a certain broad appeal.