Having read the recent Elham agenda, I thought once and again about the blogsphere.  There is no doubt blogs, although still underlined in red by my Microsoft Word 2003 dictionary, are now a significant part of the 21st century media. Nonetheless, we still hear “main stream media” versus “blogs” whenever the latter is used as any form of reference. Why do we still make the distinction and is it really a matter of time until blogs are considered of the same class as other forms of writing?

I personally think the gist of the problem is far away from the form of writing – be it on paper or electronically on a webpage. The condescending feelings blogs receive from some people are the result of the very nature of blogging: self and free publishing for everyone. The middle process of publishing had for years worked as a filtering procedure that reduces the amount of gibberish. If someone had taken the risk of paying to get it published then there should be at least something that is worth noticing or reading. There was also the privilege of the editor, noticing the unnoticed by the author and presenting an enhanced final piece. This is, of course, not to say that there are no massive amounts of published books that are worthless, but that this number would certainly be less than that of same value blogs one would find.

Filtering, however, is a double-edged sword. Filtering can also mean the inaccessibility of publishing to certain people who indeed have something crucial to say. Filtering can mean that in some countries the quality check can extend to censoring, and the decision of what might be considered useful can be skewed to fit particular agendas.

From here, blogging gained its fame. The freedom of writing, shedding the light on subjects and souls main stream media purposefully or neglectfully overlook, especially in our part of the world.

A blogger myself, I still notice the problem. How do we make the distinction between those who are writing the unwritten history, those whose blogs are testimonials of a place and time, those whose blogs are worth going next to published papers in the electronic and physical libraries of the world, those whose posts are to be reviewed, considered and cited by humanity researchers, how do we distinguish them from the rest of the crowd?

The same “going shopping” topic can be tackled in an aimless, venting and ranting form by one blogger, but can highlight a sociocultural phenomenon by another. Not to deny the former their right of expressing themselves, but how do we prevent readers’ disorientation amongst all of this?

Blogging makes it even harder- not every post in the one blog is equal. The daily writing nature of blogs can tempt bloggers to write more frequently, often with less time spent on each post. An analysis of the evolution of blogs belonging to columnists is indeed interesting.

That, consequently, takes us back to the selection process. Like how books & published papers distinguish themselves and their status by certain labels: a paper published in Nature or IEEE, an article in the Economist, or a book by HBSP. Like how the Internet has evolved to be a proper medium to host references with the introduction of digital libraries. I envisage (or wish for) a similar future for the blogsphere.