Last week, I ran across an print ad in Newsweek for Technorati, probably the major blog-tracking service. The ad copy went like this:
Behind every breaking story, there’s a Blog
Behind every emerging trend, there’s a Blog
Beind every big scandal, there’s a Blog
Find it.
Every single day, the blogosphere gets blamed or credited for some world-changing event or another. Hell, this very blog has done it at least twice in the past week. Given of all of the coverage of the “blogosphere,” you might imagine it as one of those amorphous clouds in an old Star Trek episode, lurching this way and that, firing laser shots of truth and opinion at various politicians, athletes, tech companies, and the entertainment industry.
And you would be wrong.
The truth is much more interesting. It turns out that — according to a recent PEW Report — most bloggers don’t really give a rats ass about that stuff: they’re more interested in saying “Hello, world! I exist!” And that is totally as it should be.
As a matter of fact, it’s so totally the point of blogging that I’m surprised that anybody would be surprised. On the other hand it’s nice to be reminded of that fact by some nice hard numbers.
After all, this is what attracted so many of us to the Web back in the mid-1990s in the first place. Not e-commerce, not fantasy sports, not politics, not movie trailers or .mp3z or social networks. The chance to express ourselves in a free and unfettered way. Just the simple fact that I could post whatever gibberish I wanted to write and potentially anybody could read it was why I taught myself HTML and built my still-alive-but-abandoned home page in early 1995.
Of course, nowadays, me and my fellow ‘lopers have it both ways: our relationships with the topics that we cover are such an essential part of our lives that we end up weaving our own personal experiences into our coverage. As you may have noticed. It’s one of the reasons we started Medialoper: we’ve all been living in the center of the ever-changing media landscape for so long that it’s just a natural extension of our ongoing never-ending conversations.
So blog on! Tell the world about your kids and pets and jobs and lives.
[tags]blogs, PEW,