Blogosphere

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blogosphere is the collective term encompassing all blogs as a community or social network.

The notion of a blogosphere is an important one for understanding blogs. Blogs by themselves are simply the published text of an author's thoughts, but the authors read and comment on others' blogs, link to them and cite them. These relationships between blogs compromise a shifting Internet-wide social and cultural network.

1 History
2 Tracking
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] History

The term blogosphere was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke.^[1] It was re-coined in 2002 by William Quick,^[2] and was quickly adopted and propagated by the warblog community. The term resembles the older word "logosphere" (from Greek logos meaning word, and sphere, interpreted as world), the "the world of words," the universe of discourse. It also resembles the term "noosphere" (Greek nous meaning mind).

As of 2007, some people still treat the term blogosphere as a joke; however, the BBC, and National Public Radio's programs Morning Edition, Day To Day, and All Things Considered have used the term several times to discuss public opinion. A number of media outlets in recent years have started treating the blogosphere as a gauge of public opinion, and it has been cited in both academic and non-academic work as evidence of rising or falling resistance to globalization, voter fatigue, and many other phenomena. ^[3]

[edit] Tracking

Sites such as Technorati, Blogdex (as of March, 2007, site is currently being "rethought"), Bloglines, Blogrunner, Blog Street, BlogsNow, PubSub, and Truth Laid Bear 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 study how fast a meme spreads through the blogosphere, in order to determine which sites are the most important for gaining early recognition.