1. Recent Trends in the Global Blogosphere By Evgeny Morozov presented at New Media Essentials summer course of Transitions OnlinePrague, July11, 2007

2. Evolution of blogging 3. 4. 5. Blogs and Google Trends 6. 7. 8. The Blog Belt 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. Some Famous Bloggers

Carl Bildt, ex Swedish PM, current FM

Margo Wallstrom, EU Commissioner

Gary Becker, Nobel Prize Winner

Jamie Oliver, chef

Moby, musician

Nicholas Kristof, NYT columnist

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. Case-studies: bloggers vs MSM

Trent Lott (2002)

Rathergate (2004)

Eason Jordan, Chief News Executive, CNN/Davos (blog-mob) (2005)

Ben Domenech/WP/plagiarism (2006)

2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict photographs controversies (2006)

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Better than MSM or not? 29. 10 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. BUT the majority of blogs are devoted to other topics! 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. Is it only the echo that we hear? 53. 54. Case study: the Chinese blogosphere and MSM 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. Things to Consider Before Starting

Objectives & Intended audience

Anonymous or not?

Group or individual?

Any advanced features planned (podcasting, photo blogging)?

Budget?

How techno-savvy are you?

Ambitious about becoming a thought leader?

60. Four Options

Social-networks with blogging (LiveJournal, MySpace, Yahoos 360 Degrees)

Hosted blog-only platforms (i.e. Blogger)

Self-installed blogging (Moveable Type, Wordpress, etc)

Web-hosts with pre-installed blogging (most of the professional blogs)

61. 62. 63. Getting noticed

Tagging your posts appearing on Technorati

Automatically adding your posts to del.icio.us and digg

Linking to other blogs and articles Trackbacks

Writing comments on other peoples blogs

Write, write, writemost of traffic on all blogs is generated by Google searches!

Let others take your contentset up a Creative Commons license; specify your terms!

64. Wider Applications

Hard to make money yet; but can be a good complementary tool

Intended and unintended consequences on your career

Increased visibility: good for some things, bad for others

Can easily turn into an important pundit whose opinion is sought

Can be a very easy break into mainstream mediaa great career in journalism

Can eventually write a book, like most famous bloggers do!

65. disclaimer: I've done my best to attribute slides, graphs and screenshots used in this presentation. Nobody is perfect, and some of them may have slipped in unclaimed apologies to the original right holders. Let's hope that my frivolous use of your graphs or tables falls under fair use ;-)