Thursday, November 02, 2006

Is the Blogosphere an iceberg?

An article by Graham Lampa of Hamline University, St. Paul Minnesota reveals some interesting statistics about blogs. Of particular note is the fact allegedly discovered by a survey that two thirds of public blogs created via centralized hosting services have not been updated in two months and that 1.09 million of these have been labelled “one-day wonders” — blogs that were posted to once and have remained untouched since.


While we’re on the subject, a mini-furore erupted in the blogosphere last year when Blaise Cronin, Professor of Information Science at Indianna University wrote a scathing piece about bloggers.

Cronin writes:

“Some blogs are akin to pamphlets or broadsheets, others more like diaries or journals, while yet others function as a kind a community alerting or information sharing mechanism. Many genres and sub-genres can be identified. Admittedly, some blogs are highly professional, reliable and informative, but most are not.”

He’s obviously referring to a certain type of blog here, the sensationalist gossip column personal diary type blog which The Dreaming Arm is most certainly not (honest!). It’s probably fair to say that a lot of blogs are crap. When you’ve got hundreds of thousands if not millions of them out there, statistically speaking quite a few are going to be not very good.

He goes on to say:

“One wonders for whom these hapless souls blog. Why do they choose to expose their unremarkable opinions, sententious drivel and unedifying private lives to the potential gaze of total strangers? What prompts this particular kind of digital exhibitionism? The present generation of bloggers seems to imagine that such crassly egotistical behavior is socially acceptable and that time-honored editorial and filtering functions have no place in cyberspace. Undoubtedly, these are the same individuals who believe that the free-for-all, communitarian approach of Wikipedia is the way forward. Librarians, of course, know better.”

Needless to say many bloggers were unhappy with these comments. What you might call “blaising” a trail across the blogosphere.

1 comment:

Julia Buckley said...

I'm not even going to get started on this guy. What a dinosaur!