blog: The Internet Talk Show
James Todd
When Governor Howard Dean ended his presidential
campaign, he did not make the announcement on CNN, ABC, NPR or in The New
York Times; he broke the news on his blog. As the invasion of Iraq became
imminent, one Baghdad source evaded the Ba’athist minders and U.S.
military censors: the blog of a young Iraqi pseudonymed “Salam Pax.” The
musings, missteps and un-pursued theories of scholars often go untold, but not
Assistant Professor Ian Agol’s. The meanderings of his mathematics research at
the University of Illinois at Chicago are displayed on his blog.
Welcome
to the wide world of blogs, Web sites formatted for raw, rapid expression in
words, images, sounds and anything else you can get into digital form. Blogs,
the word is a contraction of Web logs, are variously online diaries,
self-published commentaries and themed discussion forums; often they are a
combination. They are most easily identified by their format, a reverse-chronological
list of dated postings. But “blog” connotes a style, too—an online persona,
usually of an individual, unleashed from the editorial constraints of
mainstream media.
Critics charge that blogs spew more unneeded,
unverified information into an already cluttered media arena. But blog
supporters say the sites broaden and expedite public discourse and also offer
helpful news filters and micro-publications for interest niches.
The birth of the “blogosphere”
Blogs
are now thoroughly integrated into the Internet. They pop up in standard Web
searches (just try a Google search of “blog + politics”) and are linked to and
from Web pages (blog provider Web sites often list links to their blogs).
Estimates put the number of blogs at over five million, although only a
minority are used regularly. Last year, America Online began offering free
blogs, termed “AOL Journals,” to its members, and the ubiquitous search engine
company Google acquired one of the original blog software providers, Pyra Labs
(news of the deal broke on Pyra CEO Evan Williams’ blog before Google could
announce it). Howard Dean’s campaign made blogs standard fare for national
political contests. Traditional media outlets will now not only source blogs,
but quote directly from reputable ones. And last year the word “blog” entered
the Oxford Dictionary of English. If you don’t blog yourself, or read
one, you probably know someone who does.
Blogs have their roots in the good old days of World
Wide Web of the early to mid 1990s, when Internet pioneers attempted to catalog
Web sites on individual Web pages. Soon, editorial comments accompanied the
links, along with references to other Web logs. By 1997, the term “blog” had
been coined.
“When we first started doing this it was just a bunch
of people writing, ‘Hello world’,” blog pioneer Dave Winer recently told
veteran journalist Christoper Lydon in an interview on Lydon’s audio blog. “And
the next step was recognition of other people.”
People outside the technical community entered the
universe of blogs, the “blogosphere,” in 1999, when free, easy-to-use blog
software first became available. With publishing costs and technical
requirements basically banished, along with editors and media gatekeepers,
Winer said the question for bloggers became, “What do you have to say?”
What to say?
The subjects of many blogs are mundane: “SportsBlog,”
“BeatBushBlog,” “Matt’s Blog,” while others such as “Wampum: Progressive
Politics, Indian Issues and Autism Advocacy” can only be described as
idiosyncratic. And yes, librarians have their say, too, in blogs like “The
Shifted Librarian” and the Georgia State University Library’s subject-specific
blogs. However the blog stars, thus far, are pundits, cultural commentators and
in-the-know techies.
At the top of most blogs rating lists, with over
100,000 hits per day, is “InstaPundit.com” by University of Tennessee law
professor Glenn Reynolds, dubbed “The Blog Father” by Wired Magazine. A
self-described “jingoistic, libertarian, cultural imperialist,” biased to the
left and biased to the right, Reynolds says InstaPundit.com’s steadily growing
audience and recent Bloggie Award for “Best Weblog About Politics” is all from
“word of e-mail.” “My original plan was that this would be a blog about cutsie
things,” he says, referring to a post on 9 September 2001 about the
best-looking tummies at the MTV Video Music Awards. But, Reynolds continues, “I
wound up writing about much more serious things mainly because of September 11th.”
Others have approached blogging
more intentionally. Matthew Gross was living in southern Utah writing a
left-leaning political blog when he became convinced that political energy
poured into blogs could be harnessed for his favorite candidate. “I hopped on
a plane to Burlington and showed up unannounced [at Howard Dean’s campaign
headquarters],” he says. “We need a blog,” he remembers telling campaign
manager Joe Trippi. Trippi agreed, and Gross became the campaign’s
blogger-in-chief.
Gross
says, “The successful campaign is the telling of a story through the media.”
This is a task blogs are suited for because they make it easy to quickly weave
links to online articles with conversational commentary from campaign staff.
“We always treated our bloggers as one would traditionally treat your top
donors,” Gross says—Which is why the campaign’s termination was announced first
on its blog.
Duke alumna Elizabeth Spiers broke into the New York
City media scene by blogging. “I just wanted an outlet for writing,” she says
about her foray into the blogosphere three years ago when she was doing equity
analysis in New York City. Her dry, “snarky” style soon found a focus when she
collaborated with friend Nick Denton in December 2002 to start “Gawker.” The
blog, which Spiers edited for nine months, first parodied upper-crust Manhattan
culture, then shifted to “satirizing the naval-gazing aspect of the media.”
By September 2003 “Gawker” had 45,000 daily visits and
two cease-and-desist letters—one from shoe maker Puma and the other from
actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. With her witticisms slipping into other media,
Spiers was snatched up by New York magazine.
“Counter-conspiratorial contraband smuggled into the
public discourse”
Blogs have the potential to expand and enrich public
discourse by giving uncensored voices to people initially overlooked by
mainstream media. Not surprisingly, blogs appeal to political outsiders, which
means popular ones are likely to be leftist, staunchly
conservative/libertarian, or independent and eclectic. Take, for example, the
popular “Daily Dish” blog by Andrew Sullivan; he is pro-Catholic Church, openly
gay and advocating for a Kerry-McCain presidential ticket.
Or consider the case of Donald Luskin. While
economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had a ready-made
forum for his views, Krugman critic Luskin, an investment officer and
self-appointed member of “The Krugman Truth Squad,” had no platform for
rebuttals. So, he blogged. After less than a year writing his blog, “The
Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid,” Luskin landed a contributing editor
position at the National Review Online. On his blog he describes his
writing in the NRO and other mainstream media as “Counter-conspiratorial
contraband smuggled into the public discourse.”
Smuggling
commentary in from the other side of the political spectrum, a pair of
bloggers—veteran journalist Joshua Marshall on “Talking Points Memo” and the
anonymous “Atrios” on his “Eschaton” blog—helped demote Republican Senator
Trent Lott when they drew attention to an initially-little-noticed remark he
made in December 2002 at Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. While print and broadcast media pecked at the story of
Lott’s seemingly racist remark in the days following the party, bloggers,
including “InstaPundit.com” Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan on his popular “The
Daily Dish,” roundly condemned Lott for his comment.
After the story
had blossomed everywhere, The New York Times’ Krugman wrote that Marshall “more
than anyone else, is responsible for making Trent Lott’s offensive remarks the
issue they should be.” Even Krugman nemesis Luskin agreed. “Trent Lott
must go as Senate majority leader,” he wrote on his blog. By the end of the
month, Lott had resigned his leadership post.
A President’s Day lesson
Public issue blogs need not be purely political.
When San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom took the controversial position that
denying marriage licenses to same-gender couples was unconstitutional,
Stanford’s Lessig forewent emotional reactions on his blog. Instead, he made
this “Presidents’ Day lesson” entry:
In our federal tradition, there has long been a duty of the
executive (and of Congress) to make an independent assessment of the
constitutionality of laws they are charged to apply or enforce. It was on that
basis that the Supreme Court originally decided it had the power to declare a
law unconstitutional (for the Constitution does not explicitly give the Court
that power).
Blogging “…extend(s) the public education mission of
the university,” says Tennessee law professor Reynolds, although his own
“InstaPundit.com” mostly deals with subjects outside his discipline. “My dean
seems to regard it as professional activity, akin to scholarship. But I never
did.” Either way, Reynolds says, blogs are ideal for fulfilling one academic maxim:
“Never have an unpublished thought.”
The topics covered on University of Illinois at
Chicago assistant mathematics professor Ian Agol’s blog don’t have the wide
appeal of “InstaPundit.com,” but the purpose of his blog is easily understood
and potentially applicable across disciplines:
When mathematical articles are published, they do not
indicate what path led the mathematician to their final result, leaving out all
the mistakes, good ideas that didn't work, and simply wrong approaches. I hope
to discuss things that I am currently thinking about, the good ideas with the
bad, to leave a sort of mathematical diary of my research.
Skeptics argue that blogs aren’t
appropriate venues for scholarship because blog authors evade the rigors of
peer review. But bloggers who form online interest communities counter that
their writing is peer reviewed—just not in the traditional order.
Assertions on blogs are reviewed after being published when readers and
fellow bloggers comment on entries. An academic paper may be dismissed when a
journal refuses to publish it, but a blog is rejected just as convincingly when
other bloggers ignore it.
Students are blogging, too. As
part of an independent study course, Duke senior Justin Walker spent two months
driving to presidential primary events, recording his on-the-ground
observations in an online blog-like “Campaign Diary” set up by Duke’s news
service. Walker says the exercise sharpened his writing and developed his eye
for spotting politically revealing details. He noted in a February entry: While
John Edwards was denouncing drug companies for corrupting the Medicare Reform
Bill at a fundraiser, a group of un-amused representatives from Pfizer Inc.
were vacating their $1,500 table.
Library blogs: scary or exciting?
When librarians first consider using blogs, “they’re
either very excited about what they could do with this, or very scared,” says
Jenny Levine, Internet development specialist for Chicago's Suburban Library
System and author of “The Shifted Librarian” blog. Through her blog Levine
champions the use of technology to “shift” information through space and
time—and in the process racks up 7,000 to 11,000 visits to her blog each day.
To allay the fears of those worried about blogs’
bypassing administrative editors, Levine points to a group of 4th, 5th
and 6th graders who use blogs responsibly to post comments for their
book club. “If you can trust them,” she says, “I think we can find people
within an academic setting [who are trustworthy].”
Partial listings of library blogs at LibDex’s “Library
Weblogs” and the Open Directory Project site show that university libraries are
mostly fearing (or at least not using) blogs. One library that is excited is
Georgia State University’s; it has fifteen librarians writing on six separate
blogs—one general library news blog and five subject-specific ones.
Teri Vogel writes the library’s
“Science News” blogs, which began with updates about new electronic journals
but branched out to include announcements about drop-in sessions, new guides,
notable Internet resources and faculty publications. Vogel also takes cues from
current events: during the Asian avian flu epidemic, she highlighted resources
from Nature, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the
World Health Organization. During the state’s evolution education controversy
she pointed her readers to an online evolution quiz. About keeping the blog,
she says, “It’s improving my ability to keep up with current awareness.”
“We’re so good at providing the service and information,
”‘The Shifted’ Levine says, “[but] we totally miss marketing the service. And
this is an excellent way to do that, and it doesn’t take a lot of time.”
Library blogs, she says (echoing the Dean campaign) are good for “telling our
story.”
The business of blogs
The business of blogs is still being worked out. For
now, a basic blog is free if you don’t mind a few ads. For a few more dollars,
$30 to $50 a year, you can get the ads removed and some extra features. A very
few of the most popular blogs actually provide a living, or at least a healthy
supplement, for their authors. Marshall, whom Krugman credited with fueling the
Trent Lott story, brings in $5,000 a month of ad revenue from his blog,
according to the Wall Street Journal.
However, “don’t quit your day job” is still the
financial rule for blogging. Even when Spiers’ “Gawker” was among the most
popular blogs, the budding journalist says she worked twenty to thirty hours a
week as a freelance writer to pay her bills. So, when New York magazine
made her an offer, according to her personal blog, “It was at that point that I
left the weblog for the milk-and-honey of free office supplies.”
The role of blogs within
businesses is also being negotiated. The anything-goes ethic of online self-expression
of blogs is not usually compatible with corporate communications. Microsoft
Corporation hosts employee blogs, but a sampling shows them to be decidedly
techie and tame. The Sacramento Bee newspaper created a buzz in blogging
circles when it revealed that blog entries by columnist Daniel Weintraub were
being edited. The headline of The New York Times story about the
decision asked, “Does an Editor’s Pencil Ruin a Web Log?”
A few smaller companies have ventured to mix the
personality of a blog into their public images. The Web site of
California-based Web design firm Little Green Footballs offers a description of
the company’s approach to creating Web pages, contact information, and a
portfolio of Web sites—and a prominent link to the popular right-leaning blog
of one the company’s two owners.
Unlikely conversations
A blog takes the musings, opinions and observations of
one citizen of the world and offers them up for the portion of the rest of
world that has Internet access. Sometimes surprising connections ensue.
The most well-known example of international relations
in the blogosphere centers on a twenty-nine-year-old Iraqi living with his
parents in Baghdad; he is still known only by his sobriquet “Salam Pax.” Ten
days before the U.S. coalition invaded his country, Pax wrote:
A BBC reporter walking thru the Mutanabi Friday book market
(again) ends his report with :
“It looks like Iraqis are putting on an air of normality”Look, what are you
supposed to do then? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door
eeeeeeeeeeeee! Besides, this “normality” doesn’t go very deep. Almost
everything is more expensive than it was a couple of months ago, people are
digging wells in their gardens, on the radio… they read out instructions on how
to make a trench and prepare for war…. [sic]
The uncensored, insider vantage point provided by
Salam Pax’s “Where is Raed?” blog eventually attracted the attention of Western
media; after being discovered, Pax wrote a column for the English newspaper the
Guardian, took numerous interviews and got a book published.
Blogs
may be at their best when they draw unlikely voices into public
conversation–voices of people like Mohammad Ali Abtahi, one of Iran’s six vice
presidents. Entries in his “Webnevesht” blog (translated from Farsi) have
pondered on whether advice from foreigners should be rejected out of hand,
critiqued the Web site of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and recalled a public meeting
with an Kenyan ambassador during which a cockroach crawled up his pants.
And
the motive for his musings? The motto of his blog gives a response common to
many bloggers: “Let me be myself!”
James Todd is a writer at
Duke’s Office of News and Communications and a freelance public radio reporter.
 
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