Once an obscure online trend, the weblog or ‘blog’ has become the buzzword on everyone’s lips. Blogs made their first widespread impression as a practical medium after the 9/11 attacks, and have grown exponentially ever since. Sites like Blogger and Movable Type have provided a free platform and made online publishing free and easy for the masses. With broadband uptake in this country on the increase, and online sources of information becoming ever more important for the average citizen, Irish blogs are swiftly attracting interest.
Ireland’s newspapers are catching on: blogs are mentioned and quoted anywhere from The Irish Times to Village. The Sunday Tribune now has a regular column highlighting the musings of Irish bloggers. Even television is in on the act: the cream of Ireland’s ‘boggersphere’ recently discussed the phenomenon on David McWilliams’ afternoon show, RTÉ’s The Big Bite.
Pay a visit to a site such as PlanetoftheBlogs.com, which aggregates postings from hundreds of Irish-based weblogs, and you are entering a world unto itself. This is what many of the bloggers listed there would consider the Irish blogosphere (or, the oft-slagged ‘boggersphere’), a cross-pollinating virtual network of blogs and bloggers that grows bigger with every new posting and every new comment. It’s an exciting notion to fathom: all these bloggers linking to each other’s sites, exchanging ideas, even attracting mainstream attention, and strengthening their cause.
But what if there is no cause? What if the notion of a ‘boggersphere’ is a false one? What if the truth is that no one really cares about blogs here?
Take the case of Slugger O’Toole. Probably the most prominent of Irish weblogs on either side of the border, it has pretty much transcended the ‘blog’ label. There are obvious reminders that what you’re reading is a blog — the dated entries, the snappy writing, the copious usage of hyperlinks, and it loosely identifies itself in the greater context of Irish bloggers — but it is far better defined as an active cross-community forum for Northern Irish issues; the fact that it takes the form of a weblog is secondary. People care more about what they read than how they read it.
Slugger’s proprietor, Mick Fealty, stated recently that his site gets an average of 3,000 hits per day, with a rise in popularity from the McCartney sisters saga. That’s quite a big number for an Irish weblog. Do many of these 3,000 visitors read blogs on a regular basis? Do they even know what blogs are? Considering the fractional percentage of regular blog use and readership in Ireland, the answer to both questions is likely ‘no’. That’s hardly supportive of the notion of a vibrant ‘boggersphere’.
The recent meet-up of Irish bloggers at the Irish Film Institute was similarly unsupportive. Effectively a closed shop, there was a lot of technical talk, indicative of a demographic that’s still overwhelmingly dominated by IT professionals blogging about matters that affect them, but not exactly the average joe. If this is what the ‘boggersphere’ is, then it’s not what the mainstream is interested in.
The Year of the Big Drought is another example of where the medium is secondary to the message. Written by our own Markham Nolan, it’s a document of one man’s personal challenge to give up drinking for a year in booze-soaked Ireland, and his perceptions of the affect of alcohol on Irish society. Though he has only been running the blog since March, Nolan attracted mainstream media attention within a matter of weeks. He has appeared on Dave Fanning’s evening show on 2FM and been interviewed by the Sunday Tribune. And what’s most significant about this media attention is that it is all focused on the content, not the form. When Nolan discussed his teetotal experiment on Fanning’s show, the term ‘weblog’ wasn’t referred to even once.
In slight contrast to this, the blogging discussion chaired by McWilliams on The Big Bite was a different experience. For Sue Walsh of Blather.net, blogs are about “multiple perspectives and different perceptions” on the issues of the day. For Mick Fealty, blogs are “an opportunity for people to break into conversation about ideas in a public space.” Everyone agreed that bloggers are critical readers of the press, but that they exist in a symbiotic relationship with the established media. For Gavin Sheridan of Gavin’s Blog, bloggers “democratise what the established media say.”
Taking this further, Matt Haughey — proprietor of the global group weblog MetaFilter — gets irritated when bloggers refer to the mainstream as the big, bad ‘other’. “There is no ‘mainstream’ media that is well-defined as Them, nor are webloggers suddenly Us,” he says. “The term ‘the Media’ is so nebulous that it includes us all.” In other words, to steal a phrase from journalist (and blogger) Dan Gillmor, we are the media. There is no ‘boggersphere’ after all; just a broader Irish media sphere. It’s a much more appealing notion. Irish bloggers should take this to heart.