Blog
A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.
The Wikipedia has an excellent overview article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
The P2P Foundation's blog is at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
We monitor developments in the Blogosphere, the interconnected universe of blogs, through a delicious tag at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Blogosphere
Typology
From Robin Hamman at http://www.cybersoc.com/2007/02/3_types_of_blog_11.html:
"Closed Blogs are at the centre of an audience that resembles a closed network. Blogs of this type include baby blogs and wedding planning blogs.
Characteristically, they have a:
- small but extremely passionate and engaged audience
- audience unlikely to grow
- audience potentially super-served - they all have a very strong personal connection, usually running both ways.
Blogs as Conduit of Information are blogs that act as the conduit between individual audience members and information or ideas. That is, the blog is the centre of the relationship between the information consumers and information producers. The blog itself may not be the origin of this content, but may merely pull it together in a useful way.
This sort of blog is characterised by:
- potentially larger audience than closed blog model
- audience highly engaged with personality and/or topic
- audience unlikely to grow rapidly because it serves same audience without reaching out
Blog as Participant in "The Conversation" are connectors of ideas and people, but also of conversations that flow between them. Blogs of this sort have an audience potentially as big as the numbers actively engaged in the conversation. New people who get involved in the conversation, or who discover a node of it, may very well follow contextualised links, visit other sites in the chain, and become regular audience members of those sites. Bloggers who create blogs like this tend to engage with the comments on their blogs and link out heavily, using tools like RSS readers and technorati to follow the "buzz". Some also use social bookmarking or social recommendation tools to save, order and share links."
(http://www.cybersoc.com/2007/02/3_types_of_blog_11.html)
Some recent blogging statistics
From http://i-wisdom.typepad.com/iwisdom/2006/11/blogs_as_a_trus.html :
European usage, 2007:
"- Blogs are now a near second to newspapers as the most trusted information source: A quarter (24%) of Europeans consider blogs a trusted source of information, still behind newspaper articles (30%), but ahead of television advertising (17%) and email marketing (14%).
- High spenders are most trusting of blogs: Of those who spend more than 145€ (£100) online every month, the proportion of people who trust blogs rises to 30%.
- France leads European blogging; Britain lags: Across Europe, six out of ten (61%) internet users have heard of blogging, and one in six (17%), have read a blog. France is the most blog-savvy country in Europe, with 90% of respondents familiar with blogs. The British are the least blog-aware, with only 50% having heard the term. In Germany, 55% have heard of blogs, 58% in Italy and 51% in Spain.
- Blogs are now driving purchase decisions: More than half (52%) of Europeans polled said that they were more likely to purchase a product if they had read positive comments from private individuals on the internet.
- They also block purchases: Nearly 40 million Europeans have not bought something after reading comments posted online."