Blogs, or online journal entries, are one of a wide range of online activities that have captured a new generation of internet users. Lauren Gelman, associate director of Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, has her own blog and studies blogging culture.
Lauren Gelman: Blogs are everywhere. It's a type of tool for publishing where the unique function is the most recent thing that you say is posted at the top of the webpage.
According to Gelman, most bloggers keep a blog to share experiences or use as a form of creative expression. That's the case for local blogger Katy Foster, who simply posts her personal anecdotes.
Katy Foster: I just write about what I know. And what I know is my family, my friends, my husband, my pets. I'm just the sort of person that sees the ridiculous in every thing. And, whenever I see it I like to point it out and share it with others.
Foster started her blog, Six Layer Kate, to entertain her friends and family. She says her entries also offer a place to practice her creative writing skills.
Blogging seems to be like the internet itself: vast and boundless, but rich in diversity. There's personal blogs, news organization blogs, and political blogs. And bloggers themselves are primarily young, but evenly split between women and men.
The local meet.the.bloggers group convenes periodically at different locations around Cleveland. This one meeting at the Gypsy Beans and Baking Company includes a married couple, two realtors, a would-be journalist, and Cleveland's self-described Renaissance geek - and Meet the Bloggers founder - George Nemeth. He started his blog Brewed Fresh Daily in 2002.
George Nemeth: I think there's still this kind of stereotype that bloggers are all, you know pasty white males that live in their parents' basement and are very socially inept.
On this night the group is interviewing Cleveland State University Professor Kathleen Engel, a national expert on predatory lending. The hour-long forum works as a conversational version of NBC's Meet The Press, where bloggers and visitors and visitors comment freely.
Fellow Blogger and attendee Jeff Coryell - who IDs himself on his blog as Yellowdog Sammy - says he considers the roundtables to be citizen journalism, a channel between newsmakers and the public.
Jeff Coryell: You know the quality may be uneven because we're not trained journalists and we tend to not have editors to over us who do a vetting process over our work. But on the other hand it's immediate and rich with detailed information.
For all the hype about the blogosphere's emergence as a twenty first century phenomenon, not everyone is catching on yet.
Do you know what blogging is?
Person 1: No, I don't.
Person 2: I know what a blog is. It's like a chat room or something like that.
Person 3: Those blogging things are for you know teens and younger kids.
But the truly internet savvy are picking up on blogs fast. George Nemeth says his blog receives about 1,000 unique visitors a week. And, he says there's nearly 500 bloggers in the Northeast Ohio community. He says the social perks of blogging are just as important as the responsibilities that come along with it. And he chooses to maintain an ethical standard where he takes all correspondence from readers seriously.
George Nemeth: They say hey I've been reading your blog and I think you better think about like rewording that or something because I don't think your facts are straight. And I always will correct things and will correct them in a visible way.
It's that transparency and need to relate that attracts more people to the blogosphere. It's a virtual porch, they say, that connects people from community to community. Tasha Flournoy, 90.3.