Dan Gainor, The Examiner
2006-11-06 10:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

Sex educator Violet Blue does it — a lot.

Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley does it — religiously.

When William Shatner also does it, he sees stars.

It seems that everyone is doing it. Walter Cronkite … David Hasselhoff … Al Roker … Anna Kournikova … Bruce Willis.

Even grandmothers are doing it. And school principals, and politicians, and Sunday school teachers, and your neighbors. Teens are even trying it.

And they’re doing it everywhere — on couches, in bedrooms, bathtubs, and the back seats of cars, on airplanes, in restaurants, outdoors. They’re even doing it in public and talking about it at happy hours.

Whenever the urge strikes, they do it in blogosphere.

Bloggers — they’re everywhere, thanks to the fast and seductive world of the Internet. And “blogging” has taken on a life of its own, where people from all walks of life — from the rich and famous to the average Joe on street — can rant, rave, satirize, criticize, philosophize, keep diaries and even report. And anyone can do it. Just get to a computer.

From the White House to the big house

They’re even blogging in the White House.

President Bush — who doesn’t blog — signed a bill in September creating a datebase of federal spending.

Bush’s signature marked the latest step toward acceptance for a new breed of Internet writer, the “citizen journalist” — part reporter, part pundit and part diarist. They’ve made their impact known, especially in the realms of politics. Consider this, in March 2005, mediabistro’s FishBowlDC became the first blog with a White House press pass.

But many people use blogging as a simple means to communicate with far-flung family and friends. Others use it as a 21st-century soapbox — complete with video, audio and photos. Almost all bloggers use it as a way to link to other ideas that they either enjoy or can criticize.

But, of course, there can be a sinister side. In September, a blogger — and Rep. Ben Cardin staffer— named Persuasionatrix was fired for embarrassing Cardin by posting online racial comments and her complaints about work in his office.

And convicted murderer Vernon Evans Jr. blogs from the bowels of the Maryland State Penitentiary as the first “death row blogger.”

What is blogging?

Blogging is keeping an Internet journal. The term “blog” is short for “Web log” and goes back to the mid-1990s.

The Media Bloggers Association says its “members slip in and out of roles as journalists, reviewers, poets, pundits or provocateurs with each post.” Bob Cox, the association’s president, is even more general with his definition. “If you ask 10 bloggers to define blogging, you will get 10 different answers — and they will all be right.”

Whether bloggers are writing about their families, pets or home renovations, they are reaching out to others. Most blogs include ways for readers to contact the author or post responses. As Cox says, “I am not just seeking an audience but looking to strike up a conversation.”

Part of that conversation is done by linking to other bloggers, news organizations, think tanks, photo Web sites (like www.Flickr.com) and more. The links are an essential component that sets blogs apart from traditional print journalism.

Some blogs include advertising, especially from Google and Amazon.com. Blogads and Intermarkets are just two companies that handle advertising for blog sites. For the most popular national blogs, that can be lucrative because payment is based on the number of viewers. Some sites simply solicit donations.

But following blogging is like trying to count raindrops. Technorati, a Web site devoted to blogs, currently tracks 57.4 million separate blogs but estimates 75,000 more are added each day. The total is more than one-sixth of the U.S. population.

A study released in July — by the Pew Internet & American Life Project — estimates that 39 percent of Internet users read blogs — or roughly 57 million American adults. Compare this to traditional media. Just 24.6 million people watch one of the big three TV broadcast news shows each night. Numerically, blogs clearly beat network news, but they pale in comparison to newspapers.

Even though daily newspaper circulation has dropped to about 51 million, and with only three of the top 25 newspapers reporting gains in the most recent six-month period, the number of actual readers — some 126 million Americans each day — is more than twice the blog readership.

One blogging survey hasn’t been that kind, however. A Gallup analysis from February criticized blog readership, saying “only 9 percent of Internet users say they frequently read blogs, while 66 percent never read them.”

Former Westminster mayor Kevin Dayhoff, 53, is one of many bloggers who mixes politics with local news and items of interest — much like a newspaper. He says blogging is “an alternative electronic conversation about current events and issues. An electronic show and tell.”

That show and tell and can be a strange mix. Dayhoff’s posts tell of his trip to Ocean City, running into Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley and struggling to make his mobile Internet connection work. “I felt like the computer-geek that I am,” he wrote, telling about moving the car back and forth to get a signal. “Pray for my wife,” he added.

To a blogger who goes by the name Broadsheet, a “40-something healthcare executive” who blogs at www.broad-sheet.blogspot.com, the whole idea of blogging has built a new community.

“Blogging breaks down a LOT of social and cultural barriers that might normally prevent people from getting to know one another in ‘normal’ circumstances,” she wrote. Her blogging experience has taken her everywhere from “a 20-something’s kegger birthday party” to London, where she met up with one of her blog readers.

Blogging in politics

Dave Wissing, a 31-year-old Columbia engineer who writes the Hedgehog Report (www.hedgehogreport.com), tracks politics with polite fervor — proud that conservative and liberal Howard County bloggers “get along pretty well.” His posts are generally conservative, but he knocked Lt. Gov. Michael Steele’s latest campaign ad. “While Steele’s last ad attacked both Republicans and Democrats, his latest offering decides to change it up a little and only attack Republicans,” he posted on his blog. “He does realize he needs Republican votes to win, doesn’t he?”

Local blogs don’t just lean right. Bruce Godfrey a 37-year-old Reisterstown attorney who posts on www.crablaw.com, said his favorite post was about his own political evolution. He called it “A Libertarian Limps Leftward,” and the writing detailed his political shift from right to left. The GOP, he now says, “ballooned the deficit through unfunded wild spending beyond the wildest drunken dreams of the last Texan president, Lyndon Johnson.”

Some politicians have tried to embrace bloggers as allies. No wonder President Bush invited so many to the bill signing. According to CQ Weekly, bloggers have “showed they have the power to move a piece of legislation — without spending cash, buttonholing lawmakers or hiring lobbyists.”

Gubernatorial candidate and Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley even has what is called an “O’Blog” on his Web site. The blog pulls no punches, accusing Gov. Bob Ehrlich — on Oct. 23 — of “another dirty trick” involving a campaign finance complaint.”

Ehrlich’s site doesn’t have a blogger.

Blogging as journalism

Resentment of traditional media is a driving force for many bloggers.

Robert Farrow, a 36-year-old nursing home director from Halethorpe, is one of several people who write for baltimorereporter.com. The blog comments on journalism including CNN, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun and The Baltimore Examiner. Farrow is critical of today’s news media. “Journalism is supposed to report the facts, editorials are supposed to give opinions, but this is no longer the case,” he stated.

David Gerstman, a 45-year-old Baltimorean who blogs as “Soccer Dad,” said media bias was “what inspired me to get involved in blogging in the first place.”

Owings Mills writer Stephanie Dray, a 35-year-old former attorney, said her “blogging is essentially publishing your own syndicated column on the Internet.”

Former Westminster mayor Kevin Dayhoff’s blog mixes news and commentary and photos such as his Sept. 19 report of a fatal Westminster crash “involving a bicyclist and a Carroll County Sheriff’s deputy.”

Baltimore Crime (baltimorecrime.blogspot.com) delivers “a digest of crime in Baltimore City, Maryland.” The blog is a collection of local police stories from several news outlets with attitude. One section of a recent post was headlined: “Dept. of Booze and Nudity.” An Oct. 31 post following protests of a racially tinged frat party at Johns Hopkins blasted the campus. “Is it not bad enough Hopkins pays no taxes?

The Baltimore Crab (baltimorecrab.blogspot.com/) promoted itself as “Baltimore’s Premiere Source For Fake News.” Written in news format, the blog told one humorous story after another — Ehrlich promoting “pedal-powered generators” to produce electricity for the poor, or tales of a “rogue underground citizen group known as the Zoning Intelligence Agency” that has a “crusade against the tyranny of roof-top doghouses and excess inches on additions.”

Nationally, bloggers have made more of a mark critiquing “fake news.” Their involvement helped uncover several media scandals including Dan Rather’s well-known CBS story citing unsubstantiated documents about Bush’s National Guard service. But that adversarial relationship is changing. Many daily newspapers like the New York Times now include blogs, as do network news operations like CBS and Fox News.

Blogging everything else

Alan Lazerow, a 22-year-old researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health who lives in Pikesville, blogs about religion, among other topics. “I started blogging to mostly vent certain frustrations with living in an Orthodox Jewish community for the first time in my life”

Lazerow’s blog includes detailed discussions of Jewish life and the Torah. But in the middle of that, Lazerow bemoans a personal loss. “One of the truly beloved things in my life has died.” His iPod’s hard drive. “We will be sitting shiva at my apartment this evening.” he added.

Blogtimore.com bills itself as “a blog of blogs.” Of course, it also calls itself — tongue-in-cheek — “The Greatest Web Site in America.” The blog appears as just a collection of headlines from other sites, but it has the depth of the human experience. In one post headlined, “Time to get back to the gym,” a blogger named “Epiphany in Baltimore (epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com),” lamented “A student told me today that I looked just like Kevin James. Aughhh.”

Paula Willey blogs as Your Neighborhood Librarian (www.yourneighborhoodlibrarian.blogspot.com), one of the many blogs that appear on Blogtimore.com. Willey, a 40-year-old part-time librarian from Lauraville, cites the potential of the Internet as “connective tissue.” It’s “especially for those of us who don't get much of our intellectual/emotional/friend life out of our work,” she said. “The use of blogs in a community is, I think, going to be huge.”

Willey’s blog is the story of her life and her family. It includes video clips of her son, and a recent post had a picture of the family house decorated for Halloween. But it’s not all domestic bliss. In one post she tells about how the children became enthralled by a popular four-letter word just before visiting family. She was worried about them “whipping out their favorite new word in front of Grandfather.”

– Dan Gainor

Why not to blog about your boss

Work is tough enough. Blogging just made it harder.

The combination of more than 57 million blogs along with social sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com, has given employers and potential employers more information than ever before. If you thought that employers just looked at your resume or ignored what you did out of the office, think again.

According to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, your blog is likely to attract a range of people who know you and “these include potential or current employers, coworkers and professional colleagues.”

And the fact is, blogging has cost people their jobs. Whether it was at Delta Airlines, Google or just Rep. Ben Cardin’s senatorial campaign, people who blog about their jobs sometimes lose them.

EFF reminds bloggers “if you work for a private employer and you have no union contract or other agreement that provides you with additional protections, you are considered an ‘at will’ employee and the employer may fire you for any reason that is not specifically prohibited by law.”

Blogging can be a landmine for an employer and sometimes a gold mine for the employee. Capitol Hill politicos won’t soon forget Jessica Cutler, the one-time congressional staffer who blogged about her sex life under the name “Washingtonienne.” The posts landed her office in hot water and landed her a fat book contract.

For employees, the standard advice for blogging about work is “don’t.” A lawyer quoted in the Sept. 27, New York Times warned that the business world would soon turn against blogging. The “safest way to blog about work is not to do it,” said Daniel M. Klein, a partner at the Atlanta law firm Buckley & Klein.

Even anonymous blog postings can eventually be traced if you give out too much information. That also means that everything you say on a blog can be held against you by employers.

Employers have to take that into account without abusing it. Experts urge companies to have human resources staff search the Internet for information about job candidates. That search should include Myspace, Facebook and the blogosphere. Companies are also urged to set policies about blogging about the job so workers know what they shouldn’t do.

– Dan Gainor

The Best Local Blogs

Looking for a hot local blog? Check out these:

» Maryland Politics NOW — www.mdpoliticsnow.com

» Kevin Dayhoff site — kevindayhoff.blogspot.com

» Blogtimore — blogtimore.com/

» Maryland Democrats Blog Network — www.mddems.org/ht/d/sp/i/583271/pid/583271

» Soccer Dad — soccerdad.baltiblogs.com

» Charm City Chronicle — charmcitychronicle.blogspot.com

» Baltimore Crime — baltimorecrime.blogspot.com

» Anger Hangover — angerhangover.livejournal.com

» The Hedgehog Report — www.davidwissing.com

» Your Neighborhood Librarian —

yourneighborhoodlibrarian.blogspot.com

» Free State Politics — freestatepolitics.blogspot.com

» Baltimore Reporter — baltimorereporter.com

» Alanlaz — www.alanlaz.blogspot.com

Other key Web sites for bloggers

» The Media Bloggers Association — mediabloggers.org

» Blogger.com — www.blogger.com

» Technorati — www.technorati.com

» Electronic Freedom Foundation — www.eff.org/bloggers

Most Popular National Blogs

Technorati rates blogs by how many other blogs link to them. Here are the best choices of the top 20 blogs from Technorati:

» The Huffington Post — www.huffingtonpost.com

» Techcrunch — www.techcrunch.com

» Daily Kos: State of the Nation — www.dailykos.com

» PostSecret — postsecret.blogspot.com

» Lifehacker, the Productivity and Software Guide — www.lifehacker.com

» Crooks and Liars — www.crooksandliars.com

» Think Progress — thinkprogress.org

» Michelle Malkin — michellemalkin.com

» Gawker, Manhattan Media News and Gossip — www.gawker.com

» Instapundit.com — instapundit.com

How to Blog

All it takes to blog is access to a computer.

Bob Cox, the president of the Media Bloggers Association, urged new bloggers to use www.blogger.com. “I generally tell people to start with Blogger (owned by Google) because they offer a free, quick and easy, three — step process, that can create a blog for you in about 30 seconds,” he explained. (As a test, I created a blog in less than two minutes thanks to a Comcast high—speed connection.)

There is a wide selection of blogging software, but Blogger.com is owned by Google, so you have some certainty about it working.