Barlow Chapter 2

In chapter two of Blogging America, Barlow speaks about how many people in this day and age are actually blogging. The author states that Technorati claims that they monitor over 75 million blogs. He also states “If we keep up at this pace, there will be over 500 million blogs by 2010” (p. 36). He also speaks of whether this is a good thing or not. There are no editors, or people making sure that the information being put up on these blogs are even factual. The author goes on to talk about how people avoid putting garbage up on their blogs because they want to be respected. This is important because in order for your readers to respect your writing, it needs to be legitimate. He later speaks of whether a code of conduct would work in the blogsphere, and whether it would really keep people from acting disorderly.


The part of the reading that I found interesting was the point about how authors want their work to be credible, because they want the reader to respect them. We spoke about this in class the other day, and the majority of the class thought that they wrote at a higher level then they would converse in, in order to sound smart. We as authors want the audience that is reading our blogs to respect what we are saying. In order to do this we need make sure there are no errors in our writing, and the topics and opinions we have are relevant and factual. As I have written in my previous essays I feel that the issue of behavior on blogs will weed itself out. There will always be people who will disagree with your opinion about a particular topic, but as long as there is a respectful conversation going back and forth then that is the purpose of these blogs, to spread as many ideas as possible.

Barlow, Arron. (2008). Blogging @merica: The New Public Sphere. Westport: Praeger