roll into the blogosphere

I am proud to have learnt from my news studies module of the relationship betwween weblogs and the public sphere, a model based on the work of Jürgen Habermas.

The term weblog covers a multitude of approaches and styles with many dealing with matters of purely personal interest. The work of Jürgen Habermas in this area is perhaps the best known, and from his study of those places that featured "organized discussion among private people that tended to be ongoing" he identifies three key features.

These are that participation is open to all (there is a principle of inclusivity), all participants are considered equal (social status or rank is disregarded), and any issue can be raised for rational debate. Together these three factors provide us with a minimal model of how we would wish debate to be conducted in a public sphere, the blogosphere.

Technological literacy, time commitment and additional financial resources are promoting the weblogs. The fact that it is so easy to use, with a typical claim being that "anyone who can e-mail or buy online can blog". Many of the available tools, especially entry-level platforms such as LiveJournal, require little technical knowledge and the level of skill required for a basic installation is significantly less than was necessary to maintain even a relatively simple website a number of years ago. With attractive templates readily available, even novices can present a sleek appearance to the world.

Moving from the technology to the content, however, the time commitment required to produce a quality weblog becomes evident. The major task here is not actually in writing but in reading - the burden involved in keeping up with the detail of news output. Bloggers are more likely to be drawn to those readers who have the time to devote to keeping up with information sources with good weblog material. However, it may not be an attractive proposition. Simply keeping track of this electronic neighborhood takes a couple of hours every night.

People searching for viewpoints on a topic of their choice will have the opportunity to see every group's position on that topic, not just the views of the major groups. In effect, the Net has become a sort of virtual village green, on which any idea can be discussed and addressed on its merits. The Internet removes barriers to both information transmission and reception, allowing unlimited interaction.

On the contrary, the very abundance of information will serve to exacerbate divisions in levels of political involvement. The gap between the politically active and the inactive will grow larger. The Internet will offer greater advantages to a political elite while simultaneously erecting another barrier for those who are uninterested and uninvolved. The prospect of spending the requisite amount of time browsing potential sources and contributing to debates with other bloggers may dissuade some from involvement.

Blogging is more of a meritocracy than other media are, but it's still hard to get noticed, even if your material is very good. Personal contacts may add you to their blogrolls (permanent lists of links on their front pages) ensuring improved ranking on Google and blog-specific indexes such as Blogdex, and may link to specific stories of yours, helping you build readership. Even if somebody overcomes the cultural barrier of not knowing other bloggers, access to equipment is still a problem.

While a weblog gives an individual autonomy to post what they want, it also places the burden on an individual to provide the resources necessary to produce the weblog. At the publishing end this is not necessarily problematic - much software is freely available, and some hosting can also be obtained for free. Should a weblog become more popular, or if the blogger wants to use a specific domain name, costs do arise (though they should still be below US$200 a year for most sites).

Weblogs, to the surprise of some, have seen the emergence of a small loose group of A-list bloggers, whose traffic and in-bound links are far in excess of those of most other bloggers. Links to weblogs, just like on the web in general, follow a power law distribution - that is the top ranked weblogs have far more links than those further down the chain.

So why does this happen? In some cases the reason is clear-cut, as some of these people are highly active, involved with the development of weblog tools, and consequently have been blogging for quite some time. They have had longer to build up their reputation and their membership, and have provided more output to which one can link. The pre-existing personal networks of these prominent bloggers are also, however, an important factor. Given the personal informal nature of weblogs it is not unusual to welcome a friend who has started a new weblog with a post from one's own site. Where the originating weblog has a large readership this will obviously push traffic to the new weblog that those without such contacts will not so easily receive.

Reaching an audience is, of course, a necessary step in becoming involved in a debate and having one's ideas being impactful. Unlike when one launches a 'zine in the real world, there is no store counter space that can be used as a base in the online world. Publicity points as there are -directories of leftwing or pro-peace blogs for example - are so overburdened by numbers that the level of publicity is inconsequential. To break into the consciousness of the blogosphere one needs to already have a reputation off-line or get significant numbers of links from already prominent bloggers, preferably over a short amount of time. So while the possibility of anonymity afforded by the weblog allows one in theory to live or die by words alone, the growing cadre of celebrity bloggers and the intrusion of real-world networking have resulted in a manner that skews the debate in the blogosphere.