What the Heck is a Blogosphere?

The terms Blogsphere and Blogosphere are used as collective terms in order to describe all of the blogs on the internet as they function as a social network or as a community. When it comes to gaining a thorough understanding of the way that blogs function, the notion of a Blogsphere or Blogosphere is extremely important. A blog in its simplest form is simply published text from an author's thoughts. However, because these blog authors also read and make comments on other blogs in addition to linking to them and citing them, a cultural and social network has been created from the relationships between these blogs and bloggers. The Blogsphere is a constantly growing and changing network which relies heavily on the need of bloggers to communicate their opinions with other bloggers.

The term 'Blogsphere', or 'Blogosphere' was coined as a joke for the first time in September of 1999. In 2002, William Wick re-coined the term which was quickly propagated by the community for warblogs, which is a type of blog created specifically for the purpose of covering a war via blog topics. The term is now used for the entire, world-wide blogging community which encompasses more than just a network of warblogs.

The term was likely coined because it resembles the word "logosphere", which is derived from Greek's "logos" meaning "word", and "sphere" as it relates to "world". So essentially, a 'logosphere' would be a "world of words", although Blogsphere also closely resembles the term "noosphere" which is derived from Greek's "nous" which means mind, so Blogsphere could be taken either to mean the world of minds, or the world of words, but with the 'B' added to relate the terms to the blogging phenomenon.

Some people still consider the 'Blogsphere' and 'Blogosphere' terms to be largely a joke, even in 2007, however the terms are gaining notoriety and are beginning to see much more use in modern day. For example, the shows Morning Edition, Day to Day and All Things Considered on the BBC and National Public Radio (NPR) have utilized these terms several times in order to discuss personal opinion over the air. The term Blogosphere has been used to gauge public opinion by a large number of different media outlets over the past several years, and the terms have been used in both academic and non-academic works to describe many phenomena including voter fatigue and the reduction of resistance to globalization.

For as long as anyone can really remember, people have been cooking up new and interesting ways to connect all the websites on the internet. After all, a World Wide "Web" should be connected in some form or fashion, right? One of the more popular ways in the past was to create "Web rings", which connected like-minded similar niche websites together to create small communities on particular subjects. Web rings could focus on an endless variety of subjects, all which mattered is that all of the member web sites would have to be relevant to that topic. Today, the more prevalent way to connect web sites with one another is to link to blogs from blogs, until everyone's weblog is connected in some form or fashion to the rest of the world, or the 'Blogosphere' if you will. If each blogger lists a small handful of their favorite blogs, and each of those bloggers lists a small collection of theirs, eventually all blogs will likely find their way into the network, interconnected by millions of reciprocal links.

There are also great web sites out there, such as Technorati, Blog lines, Pub Sub, Blog Street, Blog runner, Blogs Now, Truth Laid Bear and Blog dex which exist solely to track the numerous interconnections between different bloggers. These web sites do wonders when it comes to tracking all of the conversations held through blogs, even as they move through different blogs. So if you are interested in learning how blogs actually work, or how the interconnections between them work, these websites will become an indispensable tool for you. The most prevalent of these sites is Technorati, which has fast become the best place to go when trying to find information on a blog, or trying to track certain blogs.