blogosphere (n): The totality of all blogs. A culture heavily overlapping with but not coincident with hackerdom; a few of its key coinages (blogrolling, fisking, anti-idiotarianism) are recorded in this lexicon for flavor. Bloggers often divide themselves into warbloggers and techbloggers. The techbloggers write about technology and technology policy, while the warbloggers are more politically focused and tend to be preoccupied with U.S. and world response to the post-9/11 war against terrorism.
Ah yes, the "blogging was born on 9/11" myth. (via NtK)
Aren't most britneyblogs these days LiveJournals?
They're still considered part of the 'blogosphere.
And warblogs are quite different from politblogs. Ken Parish's 'blog, for example, is *not* a warblog. It's not even limited to right-wingers: the rightie Scott Wickstein, for example, is much too smart to be running a warblog, even though he only talks about politics.
And then there's people like you and Graham who 'blog on a mixture, so would I if I could get my fuckin' domain name working, so do a great many people.
Are LiveJournals part of the blogosphere, even if their content is predominantly about who said what to whom and the only people who read them are the owner's friends from the high school cafeteria or goth club?
Re Livejournal: don't forget the owner's friends from Uni and people they say hello to at indie gigs. They're an important part of the readership demographic too.
ah yes, them too.
The point is that LiveJournals (or DeadJournals, their more angsty equivalents) are virtually a separate memepool, and memes seldom make the jump out of them to the blogosphere. LiveJournals tend to be also comprised of long entries recounting details of the writer's personal life/thoughts/crushes/&c, which typically doesn't travel well outside their friends' immediate community; especially since there are so many strangers to choose from out there.
Nice thesis, but...
http://jwz.livejournal.com/
He's using it as a blog. I wonder if he's doing so out of sheer contrarianism.
The demographic impression I got of LiveJournal was that (a) the vast majority of users were teenaged girls, and (b) of those who weren't, most of them were goths.
I know, I know. Plus I think the proprietors of Livejournal tend to play up their separation from the blogosphere. Whereas pitas.com, whom I seem to recall predate Blogger, suffer from no such pretentions about "not being weblogs", even though they probably have much of the same demog as Livejournal, perhaps with a more indiekid flavour.
Are Pitas still around? Haven't heard much from them lately.
True, Andrew, but I've seen a few livejournals make the jump to 'blogginess (mostly, I admit, young women (tho usually older than teenaged) who've decided regularly ranting on politics is only marginally less interesting than their cats)
Hmm. I wonder how many livejournals are kept by cat-hoarders.
Wot no britneyblogs? ESR is a tool.