The Early Days of Blogging - Presented at the 2009 HyperText conference, this paper is an extensively cited and well-researched narrative of the blogosphere's formative period. It delves deep into the involvement of Jorn Barger, Dave Winer, and other A-list luminaries.
posted by SpecialK on Jul 6, 2009 - 36 comments

Instructables.com moves to a "pay to see" model Instructables, the community craft blog of the handy set, has moved to a closed pay-only model, and the timer is ticking for legacy accounts. After 90 days from implementation rollover, people who do not pay for an Instructables "Pro" account will have their accounts "crippled". Non-paying accounts will no longer be able to view entire instructables at once, print out projects or get a PDF, have a "favorites" list, and most perniciously, people won't be able to view "secondary" images in instructable steps that have multiple images. (Even if you happen to be the person that created it.) [more inside]
posted by dejah420 on Jun 17, 2009 - 61 comments

Mapping Iran's Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere. [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Jun 5, 2008 - 4 comments

"Not everybody's a critic." Richard Schickel bitchslaps the blogosphere (in response to this) and not for the first time. The blogosphere slaps back. (via)
posted by Horace Rumpole on May 21, 2007 - 49 comments

"I've been getting death threat comments on this blog." Kathy Sierra, of the Creating Passionate Users blog, has currently canceled a talk at the ETech conference because of death threats on (and off) her blog. Scoble's mad, and so is everyone else. But isn't this what happens when we bring anonymity to the Internet?
posted by zabuni on Mar 26, 2007 - 122 comments

Paglia's back. "I had certainly assumed the Web was surfeited with more than enough material, but evidently many others beside myself find the partisan polarization of the blogosphere numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix." If you like that sentence, you'll love the return of Camille Paglia to Salon.com.
posted by staggernation on Feb 14, 2007 - 61 comments

30 blogs a seguir en 2007 A selection of original and creative blogs in Spanish besides rankings and A-lists.
posted by jlori on Jan 4, 2007 - 15 comments

Senator John McCain (R. - AZ) has introduced legislation [PDF] that would hold blogs responsible for all activity in their comments sections and user profiles. Provisions of the proposed bill include: (1) commercial websites and personal blogs "would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000," (2) bloggers with comment sections may face "even stiffer penalties" than ISPs, and (3) any social-networking site must take "effective measures" to remove any Web page that's "associated" with a sex offender. "Because 'social-networking site' isn't defined, it could encompass far more than just MySpace.com, Friendster and similar sites." The list could include any site that allows comments, authot and personal profiles. Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that this proposal may be based more "on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts." "McCain’s legislation could deal a serious blow to the blogosphere. Lacking resources to police their sites, many individual blogs may have to shut down open discussion."^*
posted by ericb on Dec 14, 2006 - 141 comments

Remember when folks were "up-in-arms" after learning that the Bush administration paid prominent political commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote 'No Child Left Behind' legislation? It turns out that a handful of liberal bloggers pulled in some decent cash this past year from various political campaigns as consultants, while maintaining their "independent" blogs. Case in point: Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) made $115,000+ from Sherrod Brown (over 15 months) and $65,000 from Mark Warner (over 12 months). Turns out Armstrong admitted this week that he has been writing on his blog under various aliases -- including 'Scott Shields.' 'Shields' received payments from the Robert Menendez campaign.
posted by ericb on Dec 8, 2006 - 57 comments

Clell Tickle: Indie Marketing Guru (YouTube)
posted by runkelfinker on Aug 13, 2006 - 22 comments

Polluting the blogosphere businessweek is writing about a new company that is basically paying bloggers to write about products --- disclosure is optional... congratulations marketers --- you ruin everything
posted by bliss322 on Jun 30, 2006 - 44 comments

"This is the kind of idea no politician could put forward now." In light of the recent Yearly KOS liberal blogger gathering, "old media" columnist David Broder surveys the potential emergence of a new generation of liberal blogs that strive to be taken seriously as promoters of actual domestic and foreign policy, including Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and The Democratic Strategist. Broder highlights a piece by Duke law professor (and anti-ironist wunderkind) Jedediah Purdy on "The New Biopolitics" (which suggests that first-world nations today should invest more into third-world economies, with the understanding that those third-world economies will later help pay the booming pensions and medical costs of first-world workers). Will liberal "ranty" blogs give way to more sober online journals of this sort? Or is it just more insider wonkery by another name? Was Woody Allen correct when he imagined what the merger of commentary and dissent would lead to, or can we look forward to a heightening of political discourse in the near future?
posted by bardic on Jun 22, 2006 - 13 comments

O'Reilly and Associates apologize about threats to keep an Irish non-profit from stealing O'Reilly's "Web 2.0" service mark. The usually-forgiving blogosphere cabal is not amused.
posted by Blazecock Pileon on May 27, 2006 - 38 comments

The (Broken) Triangle: Progressive Bloggers in the Wilderness. The Huffington Post's Peter Daou, whose dour forecast of how Bush and lazy media would spin away the NSA scandal proved prescient, on why "netroots activists" can't get traction: "It's slow-motion-car-wreck painful, and most certainly NOT where the left's triangle should be a half decade into the new millennium, as the Bush-propping machine hums and whirrs, poll numbers rise and fall, Iraq bleeds, scandal dissolves into scandal, terror speech blends into terror speech. The landscape is there for everyone to see, to analyze. Enough time has elapsed to make the system transparent. It is dismaying for netroots activists to see the same mistakes repeated..."
posted by digaman on Jan 13, 2006 - 19 comments

Remember Blogpoly? You can now play it online at Kurnik. Still no Metafilter though. (via Blogger Buzz)
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Dec 1, 2005 - 2 comments

What Blogs Are vs What They Are Not Doc Searls' closing keynote at Les Blogs, Paris, 25 April 2005 A succinct set of 25 slides that articulate the debate raging in the blogosphere about blogs, free speech, the media, citizen journalists . Slides link courtesy Gaping Void.
posted by infini on Apr 29, 2005 - 33 comments

Senator's aide admits to writing "Schiavo Memo". Hoping for another "memogate" story, bloggers have been pushing accusations for the last few weeks that the highly-criticized GOP memo indicating the "political advantage" of the Terri Schiavo situation was a forgery or "dirty tricks" from Democrats. Today, the legal counsel to Florida Sen. Mel Martinez admitted to writing and distributing the memo (and promptly resigned.) Many bloggers who pushed the accusation are, shall we say, not exactly jumping at the opportunity to print mea culpas. Considering the growing debate about bloggers being treated as journalistic equals, what obligations does the blogosphere have to simply admit it was completely wrong on a story?
posted by XQUZYPHYR on Apr 7, 2005 - 64 comments

Take a Nobel economist who has devoted his career to studying the effect of social and political change on microeconomic theory. Combine with the most prolific legal scholar of the past half-century and federal judge with immeasurable influence on American jurisprudence. Add Moveable Type and a bit of technical help from our fearless leader, and you've got the Becker-Posner Blog, which debuts today.
posted by PrinceValium on Dec 5, 2004 - 14 comments

Weblogging, the fad most poplular amongst teenage girls, is dying. The "blogosphere" will number ten million souls by the end of 2004, but almost all of them will be dead.
posted by the fire you left me on Oct 8, 2003 - 31 comments

Penisblog Ben Brown did it ages ago, staking out the avant-garde as usual. Now the meme gets its own site. Can you match the member to the bloggeur? (Extra credit for spinning the project into a discursion on openness and self-revelation online.) Not, as they say, work-safe.
posted by joeclark on Apr 16, 2003 - 64 comments

42 days to a Googlewash. The Register comes out all guns firing at the blogging community's apparent "redefinition" of a term, calling it Orwellian doublespeak. Is it true that a small coterie of A-list bloggers is able to change the way we (for we: read Google users) define a phrase? Or is there really something bigger going on?
posted by cbrody on Apr 3, 2003 - 65 comments

3 Feb '03 Word of the Day: Blog. Pronunciation: [blahg] Definition 1: A clipping of "weblog," blog is internet jargon for what is basically an online journal or diary. Yes, blogs are going mainstream. Will businesses discover uses for blogs & blog software? Will (mobile-phone) "moblogging" catch on? This link says ...the first Web logs consisted largely of links to sites on the Internet that the author found interesting. Early bloggers were presurfing the Web for people, in a sense [sound familiar?]. About 1999, as free software came on the scene -- making it easy to create Web logs -- the content began to shift. Blogs became more personal, less link-driven. But what is a blog to you? And what is the future of the "blogosphere"?
posted by Shane on Feb 3, 2003 - 25 comments

At large in the blogosphere And yet another analysis of the world of blogging. Does this one, by a decent literary and cultural critic, present blogs and blogging in a better light than many earlier ones? note: NY Times free reg reqd.
posted by Postroad on May 5, 2002 - 43 comments

State of the Union Blog: quite possibly the first web site devoted to analyzing a speech before it happens. (warning: contains Republican content)
posted by darukaru on Jan 29, 2002 - 27 comments

proposes a new term-

"Bioblog - weblog-type sites in which the primary (but not necessarily exclusive) focus is on its author instead of the web or other external media, but which, of course, is still more aligned in spirit and form to weblogs rather than traditional online journals."

posted by TuxHeDoh on Feb 23, 2001 - 58 comments