An Introduction to Blogs & Blogging

By Clay Shirky & Kate Monahan

screenshot of the boingboing.net website

Boingboing.net, a popular blog that covers a multitude of topics.

If you use the Internet with any regularity, you're probably already familiar with weblogs (or blogs). In fact, given the ever-skyrocketing popularity of blogs, you may already be a regular reader of one or more blogs, if not a blogger yourself. For the uninitiated, a blog is a website consisting of separate, date-stamped entries, known as posts. These are usually text, but there are also photo blogs, audio blogs, and video blogs. Blogs are usually organized with the most recent post at the top of the page, and tend toward the personal voice.

Since their inception in the mid-1990s, the number of blogs has exploded. There are now tens of millions of them, written for a huge variety of reasons and covering an equally huge variety of subjects: from the online diaries of bored high school students, to the musings of CEOs, to a myriad of social and technical subjects, as well as simple personal expression. Their scope has expanded over the years to encompass major news sources, entertainment, academics, and every imaginable niche topic, from Engadget.com, a blog about gadgets and consumer electronics, to DailyKos.com, a popular political blog, to Boingboing.net, described as a "Cabinet of Wonder," whose repertoire resists easy description. (At the time of this writing, for instance, the day's offerings included posts on controversial art, copyright law, fires in California, creationism, and clothing made from recycled plastic bags.)

A typical blog consists of time-stamped posts containing a title or headline, the body of the post, a category assignment and/or tags (keywords) relating to the content of the post, a permalink (the permanent URL of the full post), comment forms for reader feedback, and, often, a list of "trackbacks," or other websites that link to the post. Frequently, blogs also enable readers to subscribe to a feed, which automatically sends new entries to the subscriber's news reader. These feeds (usually available from an "RSS" or "XML" button on the site) enable the subscriber to keep up to date on new entries from various blogs without having to visit the individual sites.

A 2006 study of blogging in the United States by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 12 million adults kept blogs, while 57 million adults (39% of U.S. Internet users) read them. They also found that men and women used blogs equally, and 46% of bloggers were over the age of 30.¹ On a worldwide scale, Technorati, a popular search engine for blogs, tracked 74.9 million blogs at the time of this writing. According to their data, more than 175,000 new blogs are created every day, and bloggers are updating their sites with an average of 1.6 million new posts a day.²

Given these numbers, it is not surprising that tools to help readers parse all this information, both from blogs and from other websites, have emerged. Filter-style blogs like Metafilter.com, blog-like social sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com, and social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are all designed to help the reader filter the interesting and relevant from everything else. Though the mechanisms differ, the common theme for each of these tools is to provide a communal online space where users can propose, post, or bookmark websites or blog entries that they find valuable.

One recent example of this sort of filtering is a project at the NYU Tisch School of the Art's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP, where the authors make their home). Robert Faludi, an ITP student, recently launched a project called BlogBlender, which aggregates (or "re-blogs") the feeds from nearly 100 other student and faculty blogs. This creates a kind of in-house newsletter, and a shared awareness of what other people in the department are thinking about or working on, without creating any additional expense or effort.

In the face of such profusion, you may wonder whether there is any value to launching a new blog. The basic answer is simple—why not? There is no cost to most of the basic blogging tools (though many blogging services also offer for-fee models that include additional features) and the set-up is quick, so you can easily try it out without much difficulty. A more complex question is what to blog? In the early days, every blog was a personal outlet, which could include professional observations in one post and favorite recipes in the next. Over time, though, issues of style and genre have emerged (as they do with every new medium). Now, there are blogs that are explicitly outlets for politics (e.g., Huffington Post, Instapundit), others for academic inquiry (Crooked Timber, Resilience Science), and so on.

Notions of the number of blogs you might publish to have become similarly varied. The original presumption, again from the days of blogs as personal outlets, was that there would be one blog per person, but this too has become more complex. There are people who maintain work and home blogs, and there are many group blogs (indeed, most of the top ten blogs on Technorati's list of the most popular are now group blogs). So, if you are starting a new blog, you will need to decide which subjects to include and which to exclude, and whether to blog alone or with others.

Blogs created by faculty generally fall into one of two categories. The first group consists of those created specifically for classes, generally used as both a showcase of coursework and as a place to encourage additional discourse among students and the faculty member. The second group consists of those that are open to the public and aimed at a wider academic community. The latter type usually serves as a repository of the faculty member's publications, observations, recommendations, and academic critiques, and the built-in permalink feature available in most blogs allows scholars to distribute their ideas via new services like Google Scholar without fear of broken links in the future.

Class blogs encourage active student involvement through comments and posts, and have the potential to significantly expand discourse both inside and outside the classroom. In the words of J. Bradford Delong, class blogs create "a larger college, an invisible college, of more people to talk to, pointing me to more interesting things. People whose views and opinions I can react to, and who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and off-the-cuff ones as well."³ In addition, these sites enable convenient and immediate dissemination of information by the faculty member, and create an ongoing archive of discussions related to the class.

In discussing scholarly blogs intended for public consumption, popular blogger Juan R. I. Cole notes that the "ability to speak directly and immediately to the public on matters of one's expertise, and to bring to bear all one's skills to affect the public debate, is new and breathtaking."⁴ The blog platform allows flexible, simple dissemination of research and criticism, and immediate feedback from peers, sidestepping the formality and delay of traditional journals and other print publications.

Footnotes

Author Biographies

Clay Shirky is a faculty member at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) who specializes in social computing. Kate Monahan is Editor of Connect: Information Technology at NYU, and a graduate student at ITP.