There is really no such thing as a blogosphere

Lately I’ve been bothered by the term blogosphere.  Maybe it’s because I hate being roped together with people like Andrew Breitbart.  Or maybe it’s because I hear blogosphere being used as if it was a source in its own right, like some sort of online collective consciousness that breaks stories and is somehow responsible for traditional journalism’s impending doom.  Either way, it’s misleading.
A blog is a communication tool.  There is an individual, or multiple individuals, behind each blog.  Blogs are most often not anti-newspapers or anti-journals, they are just a type of website, one that is easy to update and archive.  A blog can be used for all sorts of things, but while the tech has been around for years, I think we are only starting to scratch the surface of the tools full potential.
The blogosphere is not a singular being or collective.  It’s just a name given to the work of a wide range of online scribes using the same communication tool.  We don’t tend to talk about Nick Jr, Fox News, and the Food Network in the same vein so why do we group together users of a tool that often have much less in common?
For the next few posts, I think I’ll highlight a few blogs and show some of the communication tool’s breadth.  Stay tuned.

This is a Borg cube, if you’re not a Star-Trek fan you can find out more about the Borg here.  This is what I tend to think about when people talk about the blogosphere, it’s also fictional.