The 20th Century will always be credited with the birth of the weblog, but the 21st Century is when it truly became a cultural phenomenon. Wikipedia states, “In the early 21st Century, blogging has quickly emerged as a popular and important means of communication, affecting public opinion and
mass media around the world” (Wikipedia). Within the past five years, blogging has been making the transition from online journals, to becoming respected independent media outlets. By 2001, schools of journalism began researching the differences between blogging and journalism (Wikipedia).The question is, just who is blogging today? In a paper for the Internet Research 4.0 Conference held in 2003, Sabrina Bonus writes that “The overwhelming majority of the blogs are written by a single author who is adult, male, and resides in the United States… the largest number of blogs in the sample are personal diaries, rather than political filters; in fact, journalistic blogs are the least common type to appear in the sample” (Bogus). Still, a quick look around the internet will easily show you that almost all demographics of people are represented on blogs. It has become a respected journalistic medium, and even CBC offers a section on their website called “The Blog Report” (Bowman). Popular teen-driven televisions shows like MuchMusic offer popular gossip blog reviews on their live television shows, and offer free online journals for their fans (Much). Additionally, blogs are becoming a must-have item on the websites of Pop Stars and famous actors. Blogs can be found on such celebrities’ websites as Britney Spears, Barbara Streisand and even Bruce Willis. Even Forbes Magazine offers a special report devoted to the “Best Blogs” (Hesseldahl). Basically, In five minutes of searching, you can find a grandfather’s religious musings, a thirteen-year old’s confession of love for Brad Pitt, a single mother’s struggle with raising her children, a political activist, a singer, a famous actor, and more. Simply put, anyone who has an interest in having their thoughts heard, can and does put it on the internet.
Even more interesting in the amount of bloggers that are out there. Pitas and Blogger are not the only tools available now. There are innumerable free services allowing anyone who wants to have a blog to have one. According to USA Today, “no one knows how many blogs there are… Three to five years ago, there were probably tens of thousands… Now there are millions. Blogspot alone hosts 1.5 million bloggers” (Keily).
One of the most famous bloggers currently writing is Heather Armstrong, who goes by the title Dooce. Her website, www.dooce.com, gets more than 50, 000 hits per day, and sometimes over 1 million per month. Due to her popularity, she has appeared on National Public Radio and ABC Radio National, and has been interviewed by the New York Times and the BBC, and has had a full page feature in Glamour Magazine. She had a category dedicated to her on Wikipedia, and when she links another site on her weblog, traffic has been known to increase dramatically. One blogger writes that “Earlier this year I thought StatCounter had gone beserk when my page hit number jumped by 6,000 in one day” (Farrell). In fact, his StatCounter was working perfectly fine. The cause for the jump in page hits was due to the fact that Dooce had linked him on her website that same day.
What ex
actly makes Dooce so famous? No one is quite sure, but I believe it has to do with a combination of factors. First, Dooce was among the first few bloggers to lose her job due to what she had written. She writes, “I started this website in February 2001. A year later I was fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace. My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID” (Dooce). This incident gained her immediate attention in the blogging world, and it signaled the growing social impact that blogging was having on the rest of the world. However, Dooce was certainly not the only blogger to lose her job for what she wrote (in fact, this author was actually fired and threatened with legal action in 2001 for the same thing), so surely they must be something else contributing to her popularity? She is a good writer, a clever and witty story teller, and perhaps, most importantly, she doesn’t shy away from writing about intimate details of her life. These details range anywhere from her struggle with depression, to a detailed account of her lifelong battle with constipation.Whatever the source of her internet-fame, Dooce’s popularity is growing everyday. In 2005 her husband, fellow blogger John Armstrong of www.blurbomat.com, quit his job and now he and Heather are stay-at-home parent’s whose sole income is generated by advertisements on Dooce’s site.