International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

A blogger is a publisher of or contributor to a weblog. Weblogs are online publications that typically present contents in inverse chronological order, time-stamped, and with hyperlinks pointing at original sources online that bloggers refer to. Usually weblogs are conversational, so that readers' comments appear along with the bloggers' own postings (→ Internet ). Bloggers emerged in large numbers during the early 2000s, along with easy-to-use, often free weblog publishing software. The entirety of all weblogs is called the blogosphere . The number of bloggers is almost impossible to state accurately as often blog trackers omit non-English-language blogs. In 2011 BlogPulse service identified more than 170 million blogs ( BlogPulse 2011 ), while in 2006 Technorati estimated that there were about 50 million blogs worldwide ( Sifry 2006 ). Most bloggers have nothing to do with journalism; their weblogs represent personal online literary forms without aiming to deliver current affairs information of public interest (→ Personal Publishing ). However, many bloggers operate close to or within → journalism , processing and publishing information in a manner that resembles journalistic routines. Bloggers have shaped → online journalism and sparked academic and professional debates about changing definitions of journalist and journalism (→ Online Media ; Professionalization of ... log in or subscribe to read full text