Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
Blogosphere
Blogosphere (alternate: blogsphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs; blogs as a community; blogs as a social network. Weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read other's blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each other's blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture.
Blogosphere is an essential concept for blogs. Blogs themselves are just web formats, whereas the blogosphere is a social phenomenon. What really differentiates blogs from webpages or forums or chatrooms is that blogs are designed from the outset to be part of that shifting internet-wide social network.
Like any other biological system, the blogosphere demonstrates all the classic ecological patterns: predators and prey, evolution and emergence, natuaral selection and adaptation. The number of links obtained by a blog, is obviously related to the quality and quantity of information presented by that blog. That means, the best blogs have the highest link level, the worst blogs have the lowest link level. The blog ecosystem has its’ own selection and adaptation mechanism. The good tends to become better, the bad tends to disappear.
Through links and commentaries, blogosphere with its’ self-perfect mechanism convert itself from a personal publishing system into a collaborative publishing system.
Sites such as Technorati, Blogdex , Blogrunner ,Blog Street and Truth Laid Bear use the links made by bloggers to track the interconnections between bloggers. Taking advantage of hypertext links which act as markers for the subjects the bloggers are discussing, these sites can follow a piece of conversation as it moves from blog to blog. These also can help information researchers like MIT Media Laboratory study on new communication technologies.
Weblogs tend to be about a variety of subjects. The form weblogs can take ranges from a simple list of personal links to diary-style. From the beginning, many weblogs have dealt with current events and politics.
Within business circles there is a particular focus on influentials and other forms of early adopter. The challenges of using blogging as a medium for advertising have been covered by Fortune magazine and Forbes magazine. Tools have been developed to track how fast a meme spreads through the blogsphere, in order to track which sites are the most important for gaining early recognition.
The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. [1] It was re-coined in 2001 by William Quick (quite seriously) and was quickly adopted and promulgated by the warblog community. Most importantly, warblogging has greatly increased the relevance of the blogosphere for most people. Before warblogging, many of the links that circulated in the blogosphere focused on the technology and web design. Daily debating about political and culture issues drew more bloggers and blog-readers into the blogosphere. In the process, bloggers are influencing the world outside the blogophere.
The term bears a similiarity to a much older word: "logosphere". In the Greek roots, "logo" means word, and "sphere" can be interpreted as "world", resulting in "the world of words", the universe of discourse.
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