Web of Influence

I really must stop posting about Blogs, as I have bombarded you with articles and references over the last few weeks. However this article, "Web of Influence" by Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell is really good and if your were to read just one article about blogs, this should be it. Here are some extracts:

The blogging revolution is making its mark on the media, to be sure. But a real revolution does normally require people to get out of the house...

The Perseus Development Corporation, a consulting firm that studies Internet trends, estimates that by 2005 more than 10 million blogs will have been created...

The top five political blogs together attract over half a million visitors per day...

The Iranian blogosphere has exploded. According to the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education’s Blog Census, Farsi is the fourth most widely used language among blogs worldwide. One service provider alone (“Persian Blog”) hosts some 60,000 active blogs. The weblogs allow young secular and religious Iranians to interact, partially taking the place of reformist newspapers that have been censored or shut down. Government efforts to impose filters on the Internet have been sporadic and only partially successful...

An international protest campaign also secured the freedom of Chinese blogger Liu Di, a 23-year-old psychology student who offended authorities with her satirical comments about the Communist Party. Yet, even as Di was released, two individuals who had circulated online petitions on her behalf were arrested. Such is life in China, where an estimated 300,000 bloggers (out of 80 million regular Internet users) uneasily coexist with the government...

One should also bear in mind that the blogosphere, mirroring global civil society as a whole, remains dominated by the developed world—a fact only heightened by claims of a digital divide. And though elite bloggers are ideologically diverse, they’re demographically similar. Middle-class white males are overrepresented in the upper echelons of the blogosphere...