May 27, 2003
Birth of a blogstory
Blogs ability to perpetuate memes is codified via
Anatomy of a Blogosphere Story. The article examines 45 blogosphere stories, tracing their movement from blog to blog. Interestingly, they pointed out the role of mainstream media in the initial proliferation of blog stories, acting as a catalyst for fueling the frenzy of further stories. The middle ground is what I would expect, punditry, online voting and summary posts all frame the initial stories issue in a unique way.
It also mentions the "branding" of stories via keywords ("googlewashing"). This once again paints the universal usage war with a negative and conspiratorial brush.
It also talks about phases of the meme's spread, where phase 1 are the "a-list" bloggers talking amongst themselves, then phase 2 is where google opens up the conversation to a wider discussion via indexing, and phase 3 is where the conversation is further opened up.
I need to think about this more. That really puts blogging in an anti-democratic light. Does the spreading of memes really rely so highly upon a few select "a-list" bloggers? There is no ground swell, but rather a focusing of worldly attention by blog-intelligencia? Does that just make a-list bloggers a substitute for major media, one whose motives may be different but whose influence is nonetheless powerful.
Posted by Stephanie at May 27, 2003 08:23 PM
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I thought that the blogosphere piece was suggesting, finally, that only a portion of the writers who participated in the unfolding of a story did enough work, enough thinking and detailed writing, to really contribute something to its development. In that sense, the piece implied that lots of blog writers have pretty low standards or a poor sense of what it means to contribute to a conversation. It would be interesting to move this topic over to the BABEL site and consider what pedagogical structures, if any, might help students learn how to participate at a higher level.