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7.4 Escape Routes: Independent Media, Cryptography, Blogs, FoaF After the explosion of the blogosphere, blogs – websites exposing the personal views of their authors, the links they chose, and the comments of their readers – are overcome by the microblogging phenomenon, from Netlog to Twitter. The mass of the blog, dead or dying of starvation without RSS feeds – the logic of Zero Comments36 is fierce – was reconfigured. A few established BigBloggers are opinion leaders broadly followed, such diverse as Andrew Sullivan, Joani Sanchez or Beppe Grillo; on the other side, Big Corporate Blogs are more and more similar to tabloids, blurring the difference between news and gossip (e.g. The Huffington Post, The Verge, Gawker). Traditional newspapers - whose paper version seems to have its days numbered – contribute the general deterioration of quality of news by pushing their prominent journalists to open their personal blog under the umbrella of the main website. Mathematically speaking, blogs behave according to Darwin’s law, and they demonstrate the distribution characteristics of a ‘long tail’ market: a few hundred blogs amass a considerable amount of links (with 4,000 of them making out the blog’s ‘Who’s Who’), while most of them – millions actually – have very few of them. In this sense, as we saw already in Chapter 2, blogs are part of the same economic set-up as (re)search. A blog enables one to share her declared, individual, and subjective viewpoint without any filter; the number of links to a blog is witness to its popularity and hence measure of its authority, which can equate or even surpass that of dailies and other traditional media as far as influence on public opinion is concerned. Credibility, trust and reputation are only related to the blog’s importance: as a particular blog’s popularity grows, it becomes difficult for it to go astray without being immediately strafed – which means not be linked anymore and thus to quickly vanish from memory. The authority commanded by Beppe Grillo’s blog, the only Italian blog amongst the world’s 100 most popular blogs as expressed in the number of links, is greater than that of the blogs of La República or Corriere della Sera (the two major Italian daily papers). The personage Beppe Grillo writes in an idiosyncratic vein, and he does not claim to sell the truth: he simply tells what he deems important from his own point of view. In a certain sense, blogs create self-managed sharing spaces; sometimes they even become the sole sources of independent information amidst the ‘normalized’ mass media. This was, for instance, the case of Iraqi blogger Salam Pax (aka Salam al-Janabi) during the second Gulf War. The greatest novelty that blogs brought to the spread of information is the automatic bundling together of different sources through RSS feed, which has become the de facto standard of exporting content on the Web. In short, RSS is an automated method to rapidly switch from one website to another, and to find and export contents that are of interest to us. The popularity of blogs is probably the main reason why RSS is so successful: thousands of weblogs are producing RSS contents, so that one sees a profusion of sites, called blogs aggregators, which offer a selection from the most-read blogs, and also of programs that enable one to access any blog
36. Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, New York: Routledge, 2007.