Research - (III)Blog power

James M. Branum's The Blogging Phenomenon - An Overview and Theoretical Consideration states:

"There is no doubt that the phenomenon of blogging has changed the Internet as we knew it three years ago ... Blogs are truly the "pirate radio stations" of the web, (Katz, et.al 1999 quoting Jesse James Garrett), by allowing individuals to create "personal platforms ... to broadcast their perspectives on current events, the media, our culture, and basically anything else that strikes their fancy from the vast sea of raw material available out there on the web. Some are more topic-focused than others, but all are really built around someone's personal interests. Neither a faceless news-gathering organization nor an impersonal clipping service, a quality weblog is distinguished by the voice of its editor, and that editor's connection with his or her audience."

Clare Hart, CEO of media monitoring agency Factiva, points out that;

"the real power of the blog does not lie in the net giving a voice to people whose opinions would never have spread so rapidly before. Their importance is rooted in people trusting one another's views more than those published on official company websites."

Hart explains;

"After a doctor, the person we would most trust is the average person who's 'just like us' - a company CEO is eighth on that list. It's the same for news sources about companies. After specialist business magazines, we trust family and friends and colleagues; journalists are sixth."

By finding a reading blogs written by people "just like" us we learn about things that we believe are of interest to us, the relationship that grows between the a blogs author and its readership can be very powerful and close friendships can be formed through correspondence in and around the blog. Blogs with a regular community of readers and commentators, as they grow, have a greater power of opinion beit political, purchase power, word-of-mouth advertising or an issue that the community backs. The more blogs linking to an individual blog, the more potential traffic a site can receive, the more people trust the opinions therein.

"In fact, blogs have become so powerful that they already have the launch of a company to their credit. Kathy Rittweger, CEO of Blinkx, was on what she thought was just a normal trip to the offices of Business 2.0 magazine to show the editor her new search software. Om Malik, one of the journalists in the meeting, was so impressed that he immediately wrote about it on his blog. 'Within a couple of hours we were being mentioned on thousands of sites and I had venture capitalists calling me left, right and centre. The blog made us so popular that we had to bring forward our launch from autumn to June.'"

The idea that the blog is a world voice and leveling tool (anonymity assures that age, race, religion, gender etc have no bearing on the way the blogs opinion is communicated) ignores the fact that the blogging medium is only available to those who have internet access:

"However, survey research suggests that the demographics of bloggers do not differ in any appreciable way from Internet users as a whole. One online survey suggests that in terms of gender balance and income distribution, the community of bloggers is more representative of the general population
than Internet users."

I have been unable to ascertain exactly which online survey this is. The article the above quote is taken from is a very thorough paper on THE POWER AND POLITICS OF BLOGS by Daniel W. Drezner, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Henry Farrell, Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, dense but well worth the read. It also discusses Clay Shirky's ideas on how the,

"persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world ... A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on."

Shirky offers models of blog power sharing and the following explanation;

"Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality. In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution."

As a practitioner documenting her work, blogging offers a medium through which I can, potentially, reach a proportionally representative slice of the people of the world show them my work and ask for their, advice, opinions, criticism, support or even help promoting it.

"The most revolutionary effect of blogging is still a ways off. The first three generations of media are remarkably age-, race- and gender-driven. What had originally been a reserve of white males is now a region of tortuous balancing and hypersensitive massaging of unspoken quotas. The blogosphere has none of that. It is the real marketplace of ideas, where there is no barrier to entry and Ragged Dick doesn't have to sell papers for very long if he's got talent."