Table of Contents
What Exactly is a Blog?
The World’s Most Powerful Blogs – A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web and composed of discrete, often informal, newspaper-style text entries (articles). Posts remain usually exposed in reverse chronological order, with the most recent post appearing first at the top of the web page.
The Greatest Blogs In The World
From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and the images of the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. He can help elect presidents and remove attorneys general while celebrating the smallest details of our daily obsessions. Here are the top 50 reasons to connect
Jessica Aldred, Amanda Astell, Lauren Cochrane, John Hind, Rafael Behr, Anna Pickard, Laura Potter, Alice Wignall, and Eva Wiseman
The following apologies were posted in the Observer For Memorandum column on Sunday, March 16, 2008
The article below said that “Psychodwarf” was Beppe Grillo’s nickname for “Mario Mastella, leader of the center-right Popular-UDEUR,” but it is his nickname for Silvio Berlusconi. Mastella’s first name is Clemente, and Popular-UDEUR was part of Romano Prodi’s center-left coalition. And Peter Rojas founded Engadget, not Ryan Block, and co-founded Gizmodo. Apologies.
1. The Huffington Post
The history of political blogging could usefully remain divided into pre-Huffington and post-Huffington periods. Before millionaire Arianna Huffington decided to participate in the event, bloggers operated in a spirit of underprivileged solidarity. They hated the mainstream media, and the feeling remained mutual.
Advertisement
Bloggers saw themselves as horseflies, pushing the arrogance of established elites from their personal computers, in their pajamas, into the night. So when, in 2005, Huffington decided to use her fortune and media connections to start a flagship Liberal blog from the ground up, she was utterly ridiculed. Who stammered the original blogger? Did he think he was?
But pajama purists were confused. Arianna Money spoke both online and offline, and the Huffington Post quickly became one of the most influential and popular magazines on the web. He recruited professional columnists and famous bloggers. He was breathing in traffic. Its launch was a historic moment in the evolution of the web as it showed that many of the old rules still apply to new media: a little marketing savvy and deep pockets can go as far as geek cred and go faster.
To borrow the gold rush comparison that web pioneers love so much, Huffington’s success made the first generation of bloggers look like two-bit researchers looking for nuggets in shallow streams before the big business does hit. In the pre-Huffington era, the big media companies ignored or feared the spider’s web; after Huffington, they began to treat it as another market, open to exploitation. Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace three years later, while novice hobbyist bloggers have to scoop up traffic crumbs under the table from big publishers.The World’s Most Powerful Blogs
2. Boing Boing
Lego reconstructions of pop videos and pastries in iPod form are generally irrelevant to serious political debate. But even the most serious bloggers often take time out of their busy schedules to convey a fleeting, slightly entertaining geeky spark. No one has done more to promote unnecessary but strangely cool, time-wasting things online than the editors of Boing Boing (subtitle: A Directory of Wonderful Things). Although, It was launched in January 2000 and has had an immeasurable influence on the style and language of blogging. But hidden amid the images of Darth Vader’s steaming CD players and kitchen towels lies a rock-solid, ultra-liberal political agenda: to defend the web as a global media free from state and corporate control.
Advertisement
Boing Boing recounts cases where despotic regimes have silenced or jailed bloggers. It helped channel bloggers’ contempt for Yahoo and Google when they bowed to Chinese censors for investment opportunities. He helped expose the growing erosion of civil liberties in the United States under post-9/11 “homeland security” legislation. And he regularly ridicules attempts by the music and film industries to attack The World’s Most Powerful Blogs
