With the recent blog-related controversies at The Washington Post over the shut down of comments on subsidiary blogs and subsequent, reactionary "blog rage" as well as with The Wall Street Journal's accusation of poor ethics among bloggers who do not fully disclose connections to companies they are writing about, the question arises of what role a blogger takes/should take in society, what exactly a blogger is.

Jeff Jarvis has written about this very question and has come to a similar conclusion as I have: that bloggers cannot be considered journalists in the same sense as a reporter for a newspaper. In fact I would go even further to say that the very nature of blogging is a completely different mode of discourse than journalism. This essential difference stems from the basic property of blogging as we know it that blogs are a vehicle for the projection of identity rather than the erasure of identity implied by journalistic standards of objectivity. This combined with the ease of publishing makes blogs essentially the ground for highly personal material of interest to a small number of people. Take any random blog on Blogger as an example, you're more likely encounter a 16-25 year old recounting daily events than an expose intended to take down the powerful. It's these small blogs that demonstrate the basic operations in blogging. Perhaps some bloggers see themselves as journalists, and many when they reach a point of popularity do begin to resemble more hierarchical forms of broadcast media, but beneath the veneer, they are still operating in a network that thrives on individual projection followed by collective, yet largely unorganized, action.

The problem is that pre-Web media seem to want to create blogs, bloggers, and "the blogosphere" (a reductive term implying a singularity not representative of the diversity) in its own image. This is very clear in Jim Brady's response to the vicious attacks on his character on blogs.

"Blogs are at odds with each other just as often as they're at odds with the media. Similarly, there are thousands of traditional media organizations in this country -- newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and magazines, most with their own Web sites. And anyone who has ever worked at one of them can testify that the media is not one big happy family. We're extremely opinionated about what our fellow journalists do. And it's impossible to say that either blogs or the mainstream media share one philosophy."

As is apparent in his language, he equates online journalism (like The Post's website) with blogging. And while this article itself resembles a blog-post in its ego-centric topic, what differs his work, like anything else published on the site, from blogging though are the processes that lead to its publishing and the fact that a blog is published within it's specific distributed network.

Let's compare the process of Brady's piece with the process of this entry. Surely the process that lead to Brady's piece being published involved a variety of editors, conversations, and discussions before it was printed. What you are reading at the moment, however, I may read over once or twice before I push the "publish" button, but is essentially an entirely individual endeavor. Then comes the network aspect. Brady's piece was published in print and online; readers have the option to tear the paper up or frame it, but the level of interactivity is relatively low. My piece here, however, is connected to other blogs via trackbacks and links, it is an attempt (the success of this attempt is not important at this stage) to engage in the network of surrounding blogs. All in all then, opposite paths have been struck between these two. Brady's article was subject to a very limited public (WP editors etc.) before becoming isolated through hierarchical distribution. This entry begins as an isolated unit, then is subject to a degree by a public after it has been published due to the distributed construction of the network.

Scott Karp's recent entry "Is the Long Tail a Lit Fuse?" also raised the question for me of just who bloggers are. Karp writes, and correctly so, that while starting a blog is easy and cheap, keeping it going is not. This I've learned in my attempt to keep this thing going. He suggests that unless we find economic models to compensate blogger's time, the number of non-spam blogs will shrink. While I completely agree with him as far as this applies to blogs and bloggers like him, who put care and effort into what he publishes, I think, like The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post (though to a lesser extent) Scott is ignoring the large section of bloggers who make up the meat of the blogging network. These people may occasionally post something with careful thought behind it, meant to have wide effect, but generally they post about their lunch last Tuesday, or that sweet party they went to last night. Perhaps instead of seeing a widespread decline in blogging, we will see a strengthening of these more relaxed blogs.

And if we get to the point where these relaxed bloggers, collectively, are the hubs of interaction, will The Journal demand that they form a code of ethics?