Draft: intro to blogging

This is a draft of the first part of my chapter on the rise of blogging. The book is intended for general readers, not tech­norati, so bear that in mind. Too tech­nical still? Not tech­nical enough?

Just so that the unini­ti­ated can get through this chapter, blog is short for web log. That is, a record of events, thoughts, articles and other items kept in chro­no­lo­gical order. The term is also used for online journals, which resemble tra­di­tional diaries. Bloggers are the people who keep these logs, and blogging is what they do. The network of blogs, con­tinu­ally ref­er­en­cing each other, linking back and forth between articles, is called, perhaps rather portent­ously, the blogosphere.

One ines­cap­able fact about blogs is that there are a lot of them. According to blog-​​tracking site Technorati, around 75,000 new blogs are started every day. In June 2006, the site was tracking 46.4mn sites. In May 2005, there were only around 9mn. The Pew Internet Usage study pub­lished in January 2005 estim­ated that there were around 50mn blog readers and that 7% of internet users had started their own blogs. These figures have pre­sum­ably risen at least fivefold like the number of blogs, since the study was written. According to Lee Rainie, who con­ducted the research, around 70% of blogs are diaries, with around 18–20% devoted to a par­tic­ular topic.

It’s still a minority activity of course. It will be a long time before blogs and blogging topple tele­vi­sion. A Gallup poll from February 2005 showed that more than half of all U.S. adults – 56 percent – said they had no know­ledge of blogs at all, and only 32 percent of Internet users said they were very or somewhat familiar with them. Nonetheless, 32% of the billion internet users still amounts to a large figure, and the typical char­ac­ter­istics of blog users –young, affluent, educated and tech­no­lo­gic­ally aware – make them influ­en­tial among their peers.

My own intro­duc­tion to writing blogs was slightly unusual. In March 2004, I was the pub­lisher of a consumer tech­no­logy magazine, What Laptop and Handheld PC. It was doing OK, with copy sales of about 22,000 and about £40K a month ad revenue. The edit­orial assistant on the magazine, Katie Lee, had the prospect of an excel­lent career in journ­alism. I knew she wouldn’t stay in the role for very long: there were no real pro­spects for pro­mo­tion, and believe me, writing about laptops gets pretty tiresome after about three months. Also, she was a really good writer and tech­nical product reviews don’t really provide much of an outlet for your creativity.

So, basic­ally, I wasn’t very sur­prised when she turned round one day and said she was handing in her notice.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“I’m starting a blog about gadgets for girls,” she said.

I was pretty worried for her. Blogs were like online diaries, weren’t they? The ones I’d come across were written by bored tech­no­lo­gists who had a day job as well. How was that going to pay the rent?

She reas­sured me that all would be well. She was joining an estab­lished tech­no­logy freel­ancer, Ashley Norris, who was already getting quite a lot of success with his gadget blog Tech Digest.

So Shiny Media was born, and Katie’s site Shiny Shiny (www.shinyshiny.tv) was attracting a lot of praise and atten­tion. Nowadays, she’s Editorial Director for a network of 20 sites covering topics from Handbags to Rugby League. They get over a million visits a month and Venture Capitalists are knocking on the door. All of which makes the 22,000 copies I was selling look rather paltry.

The launch of Shiny was borne from a number of factors; not just that working for me was mind-​​numbingly boring. “I’d become com­pletely dis­en­chanted with the women’s press in the UK,” says Katie. “I wanted to write about nice-​​looking gadgets and the women’s magazines weren’t having any of it. I’d approached a number of editors but the amount of tech­no­logy they allowed in was so tent­ative it may as well have not been there.

“It’s complete nonsense that girls aren’t into tech­no­logy. They are. Yet no existing pub­lic­a­tion would acknow­ledge that. I was already finding tra­di­tional media dreary compared to the things I was looking at on the web. Most pub­lic­a­tions aimed at women are filled with clichés, rewrite the same features again and again and never say anything that is remotely con­tro­ver­sial. It had to be the web.”

Writing on the internet allowed for dif­ferent forms of com­mu­nic­a­tion than were per­mitted by the main­stream press, it seemed to Katie, and this was key to their attrac­tion. “Blogs still have the feel of being ‘by the people, for the people’. The writers don’t have any of the snob­bish­ness or elitism towards their read­er­ship that char­ac­ter­ises many print journ­al­ists. Blog writing tends towards being chatty and personal.

“And we are able to be properly funny. The jokes in the main­stream amount to a few silly puns, and that’s not funny at all. I suppose that was another thing that attracted me towards starting Shiny. We try to make it part of our edit­orial culture that our posts make people laugh. In some respects, when we write funny posts about some­thing that is treated really ser­i­ously in the main­stream, like shoes or handbags, we’re decon­structing that dialogue and allowing readers to look at the products with fresh eyes.

“Also, as a reader you have the right to reply imme­di­ately to the whole of the rest of the read­er­ship. This makes blogs far more inter­active than print media or standard magazine-​​style websites. It also enforces accuracy. Readers will pick you up on any mistakes you make imme­di­ately, and the recording of that error becomes part of the website. That makes you check your facts again.

Why are people so attracted to reading blogs, rather than pro­fes­sional, full-​​time, trained writers? “It’s an idea that doesn’t sound very inter­esting on paper,” says Katie, “It’s one of those things where you have to start doing it in order to see the attrac­tion. One thing is your rela­tion­ship with the writer. Blog writers are almost uni­ver­sally very honest and very personal in their com­mu­nic­a­tions. And there is a greater level of inter­ac­tion than you get on tra­di­tional websites. Also the speed of pub­lishing. With the comments and the like­li­hood of regular updates, the blogs change and develop over the course of the day. It fits well into the work patterns of people who sit at a computer all day. It only takes a couple of minutes to check out what’s hap­pening on your favourite blog and maybe post a comment.

Drew Benvie, an Account Director at Lewis PR and another keen blogger, feels the con­di­tions for the blogging boom are at least par­tially tech­no­lo­gical: “People blog because they can. Personal pages have been around for a long time, but until a very short time ago you had to be able to code to some degree to be allowed access. Nowadays, the tools for blogging are com­pletely fool­proof. Also, blogs can offer a much richer envir­on­ment than was avail­able pre­vi­ously. You can simply add photos from your online account at flickr, you can add videos from YouTube and present a list of your online book­marks without any tech­nical ability whatsoever.

For Drew, the attrac­tions of reading blogs come down to three things. The first is honesty. When you read someone’s blog posting you’re gaining access to a real person. It hasn’t been screened or mod­u­lated by a house style or filtered through editors and sub-​​editors. It isn’t written to gain favour with advert­isers or restricted by the tra­di­tional media’s tendency to dampen down emotions. The second factor is the speed of blog pub­lishing. Blogs can allow you to read ‘tomorrow’s news today’. Bloggers have access to inform­a­tion that isn’t public yet, or were eye-​​witnesses to an event. Since there’s no chain of editors, no printing and a dis­tri­bu­tion media that runs at the speed of light, they are able to publish events as they happen. At tech­no­logy con­fer­ences, it’s not uncommon to see del­eg­ates blogging a present­a­tion while it is happening.

The third key to the attrac­tion, according to Drew, is the net­working effect that is created by the blog com­munity. This affects both readers and writers. Unlike most tra­di­tional media, you are speaking to people who will speak back to you. If you make a comment on someone’s posting, you can reas­on­ably expect the author to make a response. As many of my inter­viewees pointed out, the com­mu­nic­a­tion model in blogging is not ‘one to many’ as with other media, but ‘many to many’.

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