the Blogosphere

"Blogs are products of a seismic cultural shift that makes someone's hangover as newsworthy as the arrival of a Harry Potter novel."

It's a Little Too Cozy in the Blogosphere
via [washingtonpost.com]

The more blogs you read and the more often you read them, the more obvious it is: They've fallen in love with themselves, each other and the beauty of what they're creating. The cult of media celebrity hasn't been broken by the Internet's democratic tendencies; it's just found new enabling technology.

The problem's built into the medium itself.

Blogs are set up to be personal forums for someone's opinions. That's the point, the liberating thing about them. Bloggers don't have to get their copy past an editor, and they can sound off at any length -- no word limits in cyberspace.

They're products of a seismic cultural shift that makes someone's hangover as newsworthy as the arrival of a Harry Potter novel. The sassier the voice, the more successful the blog is likely to be. In a Google universe, success is defined by hits: the number of visits a Web page gets. The more blogs link to each other, the more hits they all get; enough hits and a cyberstar is born. (...)click here to go to the article