Section 5.4. Blogs | iPhone: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

5.4. Blogs

If you want your news fast, furious, and highly opinionated, a Web log or blog may be just the thing to spice up your day. A blog is an online diary or journal posted on the Web for all to see.

There are millions of blogs peppered around the Internet, turning it into the world's largest populist press. While many of them are deeply personal sites that read like someone's diary (" Today I took my pet chinchilla, Wee Fergus, to the vet "), other blogs aim higher.

Tip: Anyone with Internet access, a little software, and something to say can set up a blogincluding you. Chapter 19 has all the details.

A few of these blogs have risen to media prominence, even making a little money and getting a modicum of respect from established news organizations with much bigger budgets and staff payrolls. The vast majority of blogs, however, don't get much readership beyond the immediate family and friends of their publisher.

Bloggers are free from the usual editorial constraints of responsibility, impartiality, and fact checking. In fact, some can be downright biased and meanwhich can make them maddening or a lot of fun, depending on your point of view. If you like super-snarky snipes from the worlds of publishing and entertainment, for example, visit Gawker (www. gawker .com), which consistently offers sarcastic dispatches on everything from celebrity sightings around New York to gossip leaked from the inner offices of glossy magazines.

Like your politics on the right side of the aisle? Try Little Green Footballs at www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog for conservative commentary . If you're more of a lefty, try Talking Points Memo (www.talkingpointsmemo.com), which provides in-depth observations on current events from a more liberal perspective. The blog-search sites described in the next section tell you how to find all kinds of blogs to suit your interests.

One thing about blogs: They're generally not censored or bound by the same fairness rules as established news organizations. If a blog seems especially cranky or spewing a lot of venom, it's not you being too sensitiveit's probably just a really cranky, venomous blog. There are a lot of them out there, especially those that focus on politics or technology.

The more politically driven bloggers often take joy in critiquing, slamming, and supplementing the work of their brethren in the print and broadcast worldsthe MSM ( mainstream media), as bloggers derisively term them. (Most bloggers also link to their original source material that inspired the post, like, say, a mainstream media story about a politician falling off a Segway or a celebrity who named her baby Apple.)

During the 2004 Democratic and Republican Conventions, it was clear that the voices from the blogosphere had taken their place alongside those of the MSM. Blogs have gotten so much buzz that even mainstream media stalwarts like the New York Times and The Washington Post now have their own blogs on the company Web sites. These officially sanctioned blogs allow reporters and editors to write in a more casual style and explore topics in a more informal way than on the news pages. If your favorite online news-source has its own blog, odds are there's a link to it right on the home page.

5.4.1. Using Blog-Search Sites

Like Web pages, there are too many blogs online to get through in any reasonable amount of time. Also like Web pages, you can find search engines to help you zero in on blogs that touch on topics you're interested in. Get your keywords ready and point your browser to any of the sites below to start your Blog Quest:

eTalkingHead . Conservative, liberal, moderate, libertarian, independentname the viewpoint and there's a blog leaning that way. If you're stumped about where to start, visit eTalking Head's directory of political blogs at http://directory.etalkinghead.com, which groups them by persuasion and provides links to those listed.
Technorati . Here it is: the Google of blogs. You can see what people are blogging about, either by category or by typing in a search term (www.technorati.com).
Blogwise . The site's design has all the visual pizzazz of a phone book, but BlogWise (www.blogwise.com) has a huge catalog of blogs to sample.
Google Blog Search . If there's a way to search something, leave it to Google to find it. Type your keywords at http://blogsearch.google.com, and Google runs out and brings you every blog it can find that's mentioned them. You can save a Google Blog search results page just like a regular bookmark (Section 2.1.3.1) and return to it whenever you want to see if any new blogs have popped up on your chosen topic. Click any of the Subscribe links on the left side of the results page, and Google Blog Search lets you subscribe to feeds (described in the next section) that alert you to new blogs without you having to go look for them.

One more thing about bloggers: They love to share and link to each other. So, if you find one particular blog you like to read, check the site for links to blogs of a similar vein. When it redesigned its Web site in early 2006, the New York Times even added a page that shows which of its articles bloggers are linking to the most. Click the "Most Popular" tab at www.nytimes.com to see what Times stories are creating the most buzz in the blogosphere.