January 2004

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Weblogs are a kind of pizza. Okay, they're not. Creators of Weblogs (bloggers) inevitably rip apart, sentence by sentence, any print media article about what weblogs are to prove how "old media don't get it." So I might as well make them happy by starting with something they can all universally reject.

About the only thing everyone agrees on about weblogs is that there are many of them. And there are nearly as many ideas about what weblogging should be. Some are online diaries, others are watchdogs, and others are simple collections of website links. Rebecca Mead put it most simply in a 2000 New Yorkerarticle: "A blog consists primarily of links to other websites and commentary about those links. Having a blog is rather like publishing your own, online version of Reader's Digest, with daily updates."

The phenomenon began in late 1998 or so, but exploded after 9/11, then again during the Iraq War. The bursts were partly due to the national addiction to news and commentary, and partly because blogging technology became even easier to use than e-mail. Blogcount.com estimates that between 2.4 million to 2.9 million weblogs are active—with more than three quarters of these updated at least weekly. Millions more have been abandoned since their creation.

That niece whose personal website once included two dozen photos of her cat may now have a blog chronicling Fluffy's favorite windowsills. More likely, she's blogging about what one of her online friends blogged about another blogger's comments regarding a newspaper article about cat owners.

It's no surprise that Christians have jumped into the blogosphere. Blogs4God.com lists 917 explicitly Christian sites, including some of the most popular: BeneDictionBlogsOn.com, ...