The following is from "We the Media", by Dan Gillmor. You can find more detailed information about blogs, citizen journalism, and the the read/write web by reading his book, or by getting your own blog up and running - you'll be surprised how easy it is.
Weblogs and their ecosystem are expanding into the space between email and the Web, and could well be a missing link in the communications chain. To date, they're the closest we've come to realizing the original, read/write promise of the Web. They were the first tool that made it easy - or at least easier - to publish on the Web.So what is a weblog, anyway? Generally speaking, it's an online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological order, meaning the most recent posting appears at the top of the page. As Meg Hourihan, cofounder of Pyra Labs, the blogging software company acquired by Google in February 2003, has noted, weblogs are "post-centric" - the posting is the key unit - rather than "page-centric," as with more traditional web sites. Weblogs typically link to other web sites and blog postings, and many allow readers to comment on the original post, thereby allowing audience discussions.
Blogs run the gamut of topics and styles. One blog may be a running commentary on current events in a specific arena. Another may be a series of personal musings, or political reporting and commentary, such as Joshua Micah Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo.com. A blog may be pointers to other people's work or products, such as Gizmodo, a site devoted to the latest and greatest gadgets, or a constantly updated "what's new" by a domain expert, such as Glenn Fleishman's excellent Wi-Fi Networking News and commentary page. While some blogging software permits readers to post their own comments, this feature has to be turned on by the blogger, and a significant number of prominent bloggers have not enabled the comment feature. At the other extreme, the Slashdot weblog, featuring news about technology and tech policy, is essentially written by its audience.
What the best individual blogs tend to have in common is voice - they are clearly written by human beings with genuine human passion.
Blogs are, as New York University's Jay Rosen puts it, an "extremely democratic form of journalism." On his PressThink blog, a site that has become essential for anyone looking at the evolution of journalism, he offers 10 points to explain why. Here are the first three:
1. The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today�s journalism comes out of the market economy.
2. Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it�as with the op-ed page. Whereas the weblog is the domain of ama�teurs and professionals are the ones being welcomed to it.
3. In journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, barriers to entry have been high. With the weblog, barriers to entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a soft�ware program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you there. Most of the capital costs required for the weblog to "work" have been sunk into the Internet itself, the largest machine in the world (with the possible exception of the international phone system.)
The nature of journalistic authority is shifting, he told me.
In a "bottom-up, chaotic system like weblog world, certain sites are important without anyone designating that," Rosen said. Moreover, when the people formerly called the audience are now participants, "that's a different kind of relationship."
Businesses have joined the conversation because blogs fill a gap. A few years into the commercial Internet, companies discovered the value of email for marketing and customer support, not to mention internal communication. Then came the plague of spam, which threatens email as a tool for external contacts. Most corporate web sites, meanwhile, are like most annual reports: static, stiff, and turgid, with the most revealing information hidden in footnotes - sometimes to disguise the truth, not tell it - and led by a "Letter from the Chief Executive" (or vacuous mission statement) that appears to have been written by a committee of lawyers and marketing people.
To the extent that even a business blog can bring information to the audience - internal or external - with more style than we tend to see on business web sites, enterprises will benefit. But what brings people back to personal weblogs is their individualized perspective.
Personal blogs also tend to be part of running conversations. One blogger will point to another's posting, perhaps to agree but often to disagree or note another angle not found in the original piece. Then the first blogger will respond, and other bloggers may join the fray. As tools are developed to help people follow those discussion threads across different sites, the cross-fertilized conversations will spread both in numbers and complexity even more quickly than they do today.
To date, blogs have been a medium mainly for individuals, though group blogs are proving to be a smart medium in some circumstances. The most popular individual bloggers draw tens of thousands of visitors daily. It's safe to say that several million people have at least tried blogging. How many do it regu�larly is unclear, but the best bet is several hundred thousand.
The addition of audio, video, animation, and other multi�media to weblogs has been an obvious move. But it's taken some time for these mediums to become part of the blogging toolkit. Bandwidth (or lack thereof) is the main reason. But as networks improve, we can take for granted that what technologists call "rich media" formats will infiltrate. (I've added audio and video to my own blog, with limited success.)
Blogging software has evolved a great deal from the first products of Dave Winer, Evan Williams, and other pioneers to the genre. The most popular, as of this writing, are Movable Type from SixApart, Radio UserLand, Live Journal, and Blogger, but a number of competitors such as 20six47 have emerged.
