Blog Binging Gorges the Net 214
Site Pixie writes "Most blogs are created by someone you don’t know, often about something you don’t care about, but that hasn’t stopped ‘blogging’ from becoming a remarkably ubiquitous phenomenon. There are even blogs about blogs such as The Blog Herald. It looks like everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame online. Estimates put the number of blogs to be in the tens of millions, with several factors influencing the count, such as whether a blog is available for public or private consumption. Carl Bialik investigates the intricacies of counting blogs, and shows how blog indexing sites like BlogPulse and Technorati are bursting at the seams with thousands of new blog entries everyday."
how about calling them... (Score:4, Funny)
Just another internet fad (though useful to some degree, if they're good).
But may I suggest rather than blog, we could call them blahgs, or even blah-blah-blahgs.
Re:how about calling them... (Score:3, Funny)
Hearing the word 'blog' 12 times in one summary is enough to make one's head explode.
Re:how about calling them... (Score:4, Funny)
This [lfw.org] is one of my pet peeves.
Re:how about calling them... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:how about calling them... (Score:3)
Blogs will evolve, and eventually they too will not longer be a fad, at which point most properly run news and information blogs will cease to be called by that name and just become "old fashioned" news sites.
Re:how about calling them... (Score:2)
Modern day fad that replaced "Homepages" (Score:2)
MOD PARENT INFORMATIVE! (example blog entry :P (Score:2, Funny)
[/rant]
And this was a perfect example of what you'll usually find in a blog - which is my reason for asking to mod it informative. As for this post, you can mod it funny if you want, since my whole point is a joke in itself. Thank you
Moderation, blah blah blah [OT] (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, why can't a post at it's unmoderated default rating be overrated or underrated?
Google Blogsearch (Score:4, Informative)
Technorati has always been slow for me and somewhat outdated. Google's Blogsearch [google.com], OTOH, seems fairly current and loads much faster.
I have only seen a few hits from Technorati (ending up at my site) but quite a few more coming from Google, starting only in the last 10 days or so.
Re:Google Blogsearch (Score:2)
Many spam blogs are hosted on Google's own Blogspot, which they seem to mine exhaustively, sadly.
I find that both Technorati and Blogpulse produce fewer, but more relevant results.
Re:Google Blogsearch (Score:2)
-blog
ought to be pretty effective; most blogs tend to have the word "blog" somewhere on the page, and most non-blogs tend to lack it.
Second Spam (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Second Spam (Score:5, Insightful)
But I won't, because I chose to read your comment, it was not shoved down my throat.
Re:Second Spam (Score:2)
I wish there was a meta tag or something that all blogs used indicating that it is in fact a blog, so that search engines could easily filter the results. If I could filter the crap blogs from my search results, I would agree with you that
Re:Second Spam (Score:2)
What you are arguing is like saying the library should only have comic books because that's all you want to read.
Re:Second Spam (Score:2)
For instance, someone looking for information about red pandas is going to have trouble if they search for "firefox." Not blog related at all, but for that person, all this junk about some web browser is worthless crap clogging their search results.
Sure, there are a bunch of blogs that probably aren't going to help you much... but what about the guy who spends 8 hours try
Re:Second Spam (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Second Spam (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, that's been the power and failing of the internet all along. Anything which gives power to the common man, letting us hear his good ideas, unfortunately also gives power to the common man, giving us access to his incessant prattle. Really, what do you want? Do you want some large media company sifting through and deciding what's good?
I'd rather have access to weblogs, at least so long as they are distinguished from spam in one factor: they aren't showing up in my inbox uninvited. Say as much as you want for however long as you want in your own weblog, and as long as I have to actively choose to read it, fine by me.
If you don't like my weblog, there's a simple solution. Don't visit it.
Re:Second Spam (Score:3, Insightful)
In what way are the majority of blogs not legitimate? Oh wait, I'm sure there are positions available in some American company helping the Chinese government to stiffle free speech. Of course, this is entirely legitimate. But hey, Cash is King, and we won't let small things like common decency stop us for making a killing
Re:Second Spam (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay, you hate George Bush. Wow. That's unique. Great, you hate pinko commie liberal hippies. Good for you. What a unique perspective. You're said about Brad and Jennifer breaking up. Oh, dear - I'm so glad you took the time to communicate that with the world. Your head hurts
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Second Spam (Score:2)
But dayum, man. Are you having a bad day? We usually pad the truth a least a little bit. You might have hurt someone's feelings.
I'm going to read your post again just to chuckle.
Re:Second Spam (Score:2)
And what is the difference between someone posting a message on Slashdot and running their own blog? A blog is about me me me with frequent updates about me me me in some way. Posting to slashdot is offering a one-time statement in a community of voices regarding the current subject.
And how does posting to slashdot make people give a fuck what you say? Posting on Slashdot is worse than posting
Re:Second Spam (Score:4, Insightful)
If you mean intentional spam, then it's not the second by far (usenet spam or instant-message spam came first).
If you mean unintentional spam, then you're misusing the word. You can more or less avoid bloggers you dislike, because unlike real spammers, they aren't single-mindedly trying to insert themselves into as many inboxes and search results as they possibly can.
Re:Second Spam (Score:2)
You would be incorrect - spamming (in regards to search engines) means to artificially and/or unethicaly inflate the ranking of a site.
The major search engine algorithms rank based on some combination of keyword relevance, user rating, and link quality/count, (possibly other criteria, who knows?). How they weigh each factor, how (and who) they blacklist, and how they detect spam is of co
Re:Second Spam (Score:2)
Umm, read your parent post a couple more times. You're talking about "intentional spamming", and it's not the second wave of internet spam. More like the third through twentieth, depending on how you count all the other cracks and crevices the spam vermin have crawled into before they settled down in the bowels of the blogosphere.
Re:Second Spam (Score:2)
Re:Second Spam (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way that blogs can really be compared to spam is perhaps in search engine rankings, where they can muddy the r
90% of everything is spam (Score:3, Interesting)
TV is a vast wasteland of crap, with a few great exceptions like Galactica and Six Feet Under.
The blogosphere is full of nonsense, self-referential mental masturbation, and useless blogrolls. Then there are blogs like Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net], The Long Tail [thelongtail.com], and WWDNK [wilwheaton.net] which are each compelling in their own way.
Spam, though, is 100% crap. In that 10% lies the difference.
Re:90% of everything is spam (Score:2)
ugh... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just like podcasting used to be called --- audio files, duh!
Re:ugh... (Score:2)
It's mostly a capture of people having a seizure on their keyboard.
Re:ugh... (Score:2)
Sure, but they have a standard form. and a fairly standardized language, even a standard tone. It is no longer funny and ironic, for instance, to describe your writing as "rants" or "ramblings", etc. (even though they are).
Re:ugh... (Score:2)
Blogs are glorified web pages are they not?
They are systems of web pages. But yes, underlying it all are the same old Web standards we're familiar with.
EricHow to masquerade your browser [ericgiguere.com]
Re:ugh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Blogs' improvement over webpages is that it's amazingly simple to build and maintain the page, meaning that nearly anyone with half a brain can get a "write-mode" Internet presence that looks good. Today's blogs would have just been yesterday's seizure-inducing, flashing, malformed Geocities page (if it existed at all).
Podcasting isn't all that revolutionary in its parts, but it was more of a chemical reaction among the technologies of web audio (and the bandwidth
Re:ugh... (Score:2)
Which is to say that we suddenly have blogs now because someone finally figured out a good way to get an idiot-proof web-page package to the general population without making them learn anything about the technology they're using... again...
You say this like it's a good thing. No wonder blogs are becoming a s
Re:ugh... (Score:2)
Oh... BINGEing (Score:5, Informative)
I still don't, ya know, CARE, but at least I understand the headline.
Re:Oh... BINGEing (Score:2)
Re:Oh... BINGEing (Score:2)
Crabby Old Guy -- no blog (Score:5, Funny)
The word "blogs", esp. blogger (and all derived words) have rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning -- especially when we have words like "write" and "writer."
Thankfully, I've found this guy who really says it all better than I can [thebestpag...iverse.net].
Re:Crabby Old Guy -- no blog (Score:3, Funny)
It's good you don't feel the need to devote that kind of time and energy to harmless things you don't like... otherwise you'd be mistaken for a loser.
Re:Crabby Old Guy needs a mirror (Score:2)
Re:Crabby Old Guy -- no blog (Score:2)
It's the same with websites, but do I complain? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's the same with websites, but do I complain? (Score:2)
Re:It's the same with websites, but do I complain? (Score:2, Insightful)
A blog is a webpage with management tools (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently if I create a web page and upload some text to it, that's not a blog. But if I use an idiot proof content-management system to "type" my web page instead of "coding" it, I'm then creating a blog.
Once you start putting pictures and links on your blog, you're making a webpage...
Re:A blog is a webpage with management tools (Score:2)
But really, I don't think the definition of a weblog really hinges on what sort of technologies you use to make it.
I code my homepage completely by hand. There is a section of it that I consider a weblog, and yes, sometimes it includes pictures. I call it a weblog because it is continually updated with new content, which is displayed in a chronological fashion. It's really that simple. The org
Re:A blog is a webpage with management tools (Score:3, Interesting)
You might as well call forums, chat, galleries, content management systems, and everything else on the web "webpages with management tools."
All of these differ in how the content is presented, the nature of that content, and how it's consumed. Forums are meant for a broad arrange of topics. Threads are meant for easy online conversation but not really meant for real time.
Chat is for real time, but not easy to go back and
Re: (Score:2)
Re:A blog is a webpage with management tools (Score:2)
Even with this additional dimension I would humbly say that it's not really the optimal form of interacti
Re:A blog is a webpage with management tools (Score:2)
Oh, because saying "website-running-a-CMS" is /so/ much easier than saying "blog".
I don't like blogs, but they're a distinct type of site, and it's easier to give them their own term. It's not like the word was being used for anything else.
Re:A blog is a webpage with management tools (Score:2)
The blogging craze seems to involve sites that consists of nothing but the journal. People are using the blog as their personal website, with little or no static content. I think t
Blog measurements hard in general. (Score:3, Informative)
There's also a lot of debate on the quality of various Blog search engines such as Technorati, Feedster, and IceRocket. I'm thinking of creating a meta indexer [feedblog.org] which simply monitors 100 real blogs at 1-5 minute intervals and then determines how quickly the blog search engines index them.
I'd love help if anyone's interested. I just don't have much time......
Thanks to Geeks/Nerds (Score:2)
Ten years ago, people called blogs homepages.
"Blogs" are in reality just easy-to-setup homepages. Without the geeks/nerds making it easy for people to set things up with sites like Blogger.com, blogs wouldn't be as popular as it is today. Many bloggers today can't even write a line of HTML.
Re:Thanks to Geeks/Nerds (Score:2)
Hell, many bloggers today can't even write a line of English!
Not a blog (Score:5, Interesting)
No doubt this is lumped in with the "blogs". However, it's just an extension of what I've done for years, but now I don't have to write static HTML pages and FTP them around. I using weblog software as a content management system and RSS to let people know when I've "published" something. Comments on the system allow me to get feedback and questions that everyone can see, rather than have me privately answer the same thing 10 times from my Inbox.
I would state that this categorically isn't a "blog", just a more useful incarnation of what people have been putting on the web for years. I'm pretty sure many other "blogs" are like mine (heck, looking at my RSS list, 99% will be better).
The internet has always been full of garbage (or, more PC'ly, "stuff I'm not interested in"). Just ignore it if you don't like it, and focus on the stuff you do like.
Who said that software patents are bad for Linux? (Score:2)
Re:Who said that software patents are bad for Linu (Score:2)
Re:Not a blog (Score:2)
You just described almost all the "blogs" that I read. Except for my (real life) friends, I don't read blogs about people's personal lives or even political opinions. I read dozens of blogs about programming, security, etc, and I call them blogs because there's no other w
Re:Not a blog (Score:2)
I don't think blog's are necessarily journals or online diaries, like many people use them for. It's also a way of distributing information that's temporal in nature and which is typically subscribed by other people. I think this differs from other content in that it is structurally meant to be consumed as a single stream on a daily/weekly basis. It has snippets of content easy for consumption.
Re:Not a blog (Score:2)
Sorry, it is. Your site shows all the hallmarks of being a weblog - periodic publishing of original articles on a personal homepage, allowing comments, using weblog software, providing feeds, using timestamps, permalinks, categories... by any reasonable definition you have a weblog. Just because you did it manually before weblogging became popular, it doesn't mean you haven't been weblogging all along. It just means the rest of the world caught up
Re:Not a blog (Score:2)
The terminological tainting is, sadly, very common and is something I've come to accept. I can't call myself a "hacker" anymore without getting into a semantic argument. I've not got the energy to keep correctin
Re:Not a blog (Score:2)
To me, it has more to do with structure than content. Slashdot comes very close to
Details of my blog (Score:4, Funny)
Sweeping generalizations (Score:5, Insightful)
Most web pages, emails, usenet posts, instant messages, SMSes, books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and indeed, spoken words are created by people I don't know, often about things I don't care about, and that hasn't stopped any of them from becoming remarkably ubiquitous.
I don't understand why people think blogging is different from any of the above.
It looks like everyone wants their fifteen minutes of fame online.
That's a crass assumption. Most do it because they enjoy doing it. Some do it because they want to make money. Some do it because all of their friends are doing it. People have a lot of different reasons. I seriously doubt that "fame", even fifteen minutes of it on the web, is a real motivator for all but a tiny but vocal minority.
People connect computers to the internet (Score:5, Funny)
Can we have more of these content-free statements of the blindingly obvious, please?
Slashdot subscribers, please stand up so that I can laugh at you.
-b
Re:People connect computers to the internet (Score:2)
Sure. Just visit any blog!
(a joke from a guy who doesn't 'get' the anti-blog backlash)
Drinking game (Score:2)
Someone coined the term - Blogorrhea (Score:3, Funny)
Not everyone is looking for fame (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it a lot more effective than getting on the phone with various family members and friends in different time zones and repeating the same stories over and over again. It allows those who are interested to find out what's going on when they want to, and allows me to communicate any updates when I want to.
And I agree, the word "blog" is annoying, and, as far as I can tell, purely a media construct. Back in the day, when I was doing game development, I used to post a monthly development log on progress on the game. (Unforutnately, it's been lost to the mists of time - even the Wayback Machine can't get to it
So they can be verbed (Score:2)
So they can be made into verbs. Try these:
"I'm going to post something on my development log"
vs
"I'm going to blog"
Same meaning, but catchier.
Re:Not everyone is looking for fame (Score:2)
Look at Six Apart's next-generation blogging tool, Project Comet [sixapart.com]. It emphasizes not only sharing, but also ways to limit access to a small group.
But that's the point (Score:3, Insightful)
But that's the point. You ignore those, I read the ones that talk about things you are interested in.
No need to be so cynical! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No need to be so cynical! (Score:2)
I think the reason many people are cynical is because so many bloggers seem to write about either A.) topics that nobody (save, perhaps, the blogger) should have any interest in; or B.) topics the blogger doesn't actually seem to know anything about.
It's the same cynicism that causes us to ask exactly why someone would want to go on Jerry Springer and tell the world about his relationship with his si
Do blogs really pollute the Internet? Come on, now (Score:2, Interesting)
Until It Reaches 6.45 Billion Blogs (Score:3, Informative)
The "relevance" and "importance" issues mentioned by the Wall Street Journal article miss the point -- blogging is all about democracy and free speech. The human desire to self-express is unstoppable.
Re:Until It Reaches 6.45 Billion Blogs (Score:2)
so what (Score:2)
How many Private Blogs (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be interesting to know how many people don't blog for fame-- blogging for personal or practicle reasons. Quite honestly, a blog is often better than a notebook. You can update your blog from any computer. Blogs are hard to lose. They don't fall apart after months of use. And you can read a blog anywhere on the internet.
I have four personal blogs just for that reason-- a wine blog because I have problems remember that great wine I had last year, a photo blog because it's easier to blog photos than it is to email them to friends, a house maintenance blog because damned if I can remember the last time I replaced the furnance filters, and a generic personal blog.
I don't consider this "blog spam" I don't hype or advertise them. Yes they are public, but it's easier to have a public blog, than a private blog for a dozen or so people. And, they are just so damn convienent.
Why blogs piss me off so much... (Score:2, Interesting)
My corporate firewall blocks anything slightly resembling a blog or higher.
Now that doesn't piss me off because I can't go read a bunch of morons thoughts on things that don't concern me, that pisses me off because normal people, who write articles about things that do concern me (day-to-day programming solutions/concepts) are switching over in droves to "blogging" their articles and ideas. So when I google about a particula
Re:Why blogs piss me off so much... (Score:2)
This sounds less like a problem with blogs than it is a problem with your firewall. With stupid policies like that, why does your sysadmin bother letting you connect to port 80 at all?
Re:Why blogs piss me off so much... (Score:2)
Blogs just suck. (Score:4, Funny)
Now for the tech diss. The blogger has no idea what he is doing. Tell me stupid blogger, what is a C struk? What is a PERL registered expression? WHO is Linux Torvalds? You do not know. Sadly. All you know is your cats, and maybe what you had for lunch, and how to link to your frends. Well, try getting a girl with THAT. Ha ha I laugh at you.
Now sad bloggger. If you'll excuse me, I have to go back to better activities than thinking about you, such as reading Slashdot and making some karma that is actually WORTH something, not stupid PageRank for my BLOG. If you see me on the street (I am the one in the pimp ALL YOUR BASE tshirt) go the other way. Do not look. Do not linhger. Go home and write about your FEELings and live the mack programming to the /. crowd and see who wins the girls.
Dys
Shocking (Score:3, Funny)
HOLY COW who knew?
Can we please get some "stuff that matters" now?
Because What We Think Is Important Enough To Publi (Score:2)
paul and strom [paulandstorm.com]
But all parodies aside, blogs should be about something, not just narsicistic ramblings.
http://auotoblog.com/ [auotoblog.com] is quite good, especially during car shows.
This is news? (Score:2)
Blogging (Score:3, Interesting)
Define blog (Score:2)
It's not a blog (Score:4, Informative)
Let's stop calling these things blogs (a word which was probably invented by a corporate whore with too much time on his hands), and start calling them what they have always been called. It's a f*cking journal that's readable by the public.
Re:It's not a blog (Score:2)
Reminds me of the time my sister came home from school and started arguing with my dad that weight doesn't exist. That it's really just gravity attracting the mass of an object. She went on about this for 5 minutes explaining it all and concluded by restating that there is no such thing as weight: there is only mass and gravity.
My dad responded "And that's what we call weight."
And, like my sister, you're arguing tha
most blogs are about cats owned by shutins (Score:2)
%s/Most/Nearly all/g
%s/often/almost always/g
This is what we wanted (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone was saying how great it would be when everyone was able to easily create and share information.
People, this is what we wanted, and it's pretty much here. This is a good thing. All we need now are better and better ways of sorting & indexing the information being created and shared.
Print Journalists Invading the Blogosphere (Score:3, Interesting)
The NY Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Jose Mercury News all announced staff layoffs last week. Where do you think those folks are going? To the Web, to eat their former employers' collective lunches. Lots of these folks have real expertise, and are bringing their contacts and rolodexes with them.
I speak from experience. I took the plunge in 2000. I was the computer-assisted reporting director at a daily newspaper that was clueless about the future of the web, and unwilling to invest in the basics (e-mail for repoters ... doh!). So I left to write for technology sites, and have been doing it ever since.
Why don't we start with YOUR man-hours? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wasted man-hours (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Am I alone? (Score:2)
It's usually time-dependent. A normal website, though updated, has pages which could basically have been written at any time, and it's not obvious in which order the site was done. A blog normally has entries tied to specific dates, and a clear order for the pages.