The Blogosphere - Essay Example

Your F. 22 March The Blogosphere The goal of this project is to define what the “blogosphere” is and determine what elements are in a blog that is considered to be high quality. Additionally, these “high quality” blogs will be examined to see what characteristics they have- such as high readership, topic, structure and title- in common with one another, if anything. This project will also attempt to determine some of these blogs are the most popular and why. This paper will also discuss the difference between a blog and traditional print column differ or will compare the similarities between them.

To summarize, I will then describe my own views of the blogosphere and its importance to society in the areas of media and communication. While conducting research to find a solid definition of blogosphere, though not typically known for its reliability, Wikipedia actually offered the most compounded definition of what a blogosphere is, calling it an interconnected community made up of all blogs (Wikipedia.org). In simple terms, the blogosphere is basically an internal web all its own of blog sites found on the world wide web that connects various blog cites through a network community.

When looking online for some of the most high quality blogs online, I found information in regards to tips of how to build high quality blogs. Website, Blogotion, is a collection of blogs that only allow “high quality” blogs on its website. When evaluating its most popular blogs, it had its own list of the top 20. When looking at them, they were all highly ranked by people who had read the blog and followed it. The very top blog had the topic of Peruvian Cuisine while others were about real life events such as a woman who was a Sports Authority from Australia while another was from the perspective of a homeless man.

However, others were more generic such as Baby Topics, one by a popular business marketer and another that is all honest perspective articles about current events and culture. (Blogotion.com). The topics of popular blogs on this website varied but what one could determine was that they were all primarily interesting subjects, some that were up and coming or some that people could relate to. Many blogs are based on societal trends or current events so it seems. When conducting research to find the top blogs, I came across a website, eBizMBA.

com, that consistently updates their top 15 most popular blogs on a regular basis to determine each sites popularity. According to the statistics ran by eBizMBA.com, the top blog as base on the research conducted on this particular day was Huffington Post followed by TMZ and BusinessInsider blogs. Many of the other top blogs were either about online marketing, technology, business or celebrity gossip sites. The difference between a blog and traditional newspaper or magazine column, I think is mostly the shelf life of the column versus the blog.

When looking for a blog, you can typically type information into a search engine and find information and look easily into archives to find blogs about similar topics. With newspaper or magazine columns, these are luck of the draw of what will appear in each issue. Additionally, the shelf life of a newspaper column is typically for the run of the print issue, whether it be daily for a newspaper, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Then, it is difficult to retrieve from an archive. Blogs also provide additional links to other information that pertains to the topic while newspapers and magazines do not have that luxury.

I think overall, the value of a blogosphere is the intertwine of all of the different blogs. They are easier to access and search out. Additionally, you can bookmark them on your computer and continue to follow a particular blog each day. Also, blogs can then be archived so you can check back at previous articles that were written in your favorite blogs. Works CitedBlogotion. 20 Most Popular Blogs. Blogotion. 2009. Web. 22 March 2012. http://blogotion.webs.com/mostpopular.html. eBizMBA.COM. Top 15 Most Popular Blogs: March 2012. eBizMBA.com, Inc. 2012. Web.

22 March 2012. http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/blogsWikipedia. Blogosphere. Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 2012. Web. 22 March 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogosphere.