Blogosphere
Blogosphere (alternate: blogsphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs. Weblogs are heavily interconnected; bloggers read other blogs, link to them, and reference them in their own writing. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture. Sites such as Technorati, Blog Street and Truth Laid Bear track the interconnections between them. In 2004 Stirling Newberry published an analysis that indicated that there were "inward" and "outward" facing blogs, blogs that gained most of their traffic from other blogs, and blots which gained most of their traffic from other sources.
In reality, weblogs — even those created by individuals working in IT — tend to be about a variety of subjects. Weblogs can range from a simple list of personal links to diary-style sites such as LiveJournal. From the beginning (1997), weblogs have dealt with current events and politics, though usually not exclusively. Weblog culture overlaps with hackerdom, but the two are not identical, though hackerdom has embraced techblogging sites such as Slashdot and Kuro5hin.
Within new media circles, there is a focus on how to outreach to the blogsphere in order to gain traction and create buzz. Within business circles their is a particular focus on influentials and other forms of early adopter. The challenges of using blogging as a medium for advertising have been covered by Fortune magazine and Forbes magazine. Tools have been developed to track how fast a meme spreads through the blogsphere, in order to track which sites are the most important for gaining early recognition.
Warbloggers often divide the blogosphere into warbloggers, lefties and techbloggers, but this wildly oversimplifies the variety that exists among weblogs. As the terms are perceived by warbloggers, 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 on terror.
The term was coined on September 10, 1999 by Brad L. Graham, as a joke. [1] It was re-coined in 2001 by William Quick (quite seriously) and was quickly adopted and promulgated by the warblog community.
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