I knew it. And implied so with posts here and here. There could not possibly be something we can call the blogosphere. The hodge-podge in content and purposes of weblogs are just too diverse and undefined as to be readily categorized as one discrete entity.
One cannot think of any uniformity or unifying factor that could possibly link together this very unruly glob that is exponentially growing in numbers and variety. Consult Technorati about this.
True, weblogs use technologies that may be adjudged similar but then these are the same technologies already extant in the world we have known for quite a while as The Internet or The World Wide Web.
Consider several definitions of Blogosphere on the Web:
• The totality of weblogs or blog-related webs. (From Wikipedia.
www.fullcirc.com/community/interactionterms.htm
• used to describe the world or community of blogs and blogging
www.fzelders.nl/weblog/
• Blogosphere (alternate: blogsphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs; blogs as a community; blogs as a social network. Weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogosphere
They describe it as a community, a social network, interconnected, and a culture.
But honestly, can it be described as a cohesive, mutually inclusive community of bloggers/writers sharing common aspirations and purposes?
We know that within this expanding universe are all the seeds of divisiveness, exclusiveness, cliquishness, belligerence, bellicosity, differences, even callousness as one would not find in an interconnected social community, sharing the same culture.
Even within the smaller spheres of political blogs, glaring differences likened to night and day are already exhibited. Not only in language but even in approaches and core purposes. And Powerline highlights this utterly glaring difference with its comment on a Washington Post column done by one of its executive director named Mr. Jim Brady. Both, by the way, share this sentiment about there being no blogosphere.
We obviously are driven to commit the same mistakes over and over again. And yet Ms. Patricia Wallace, author of Psychology of the Internet, had emphatically inferred and cautioned that with our forthcoming universal use of the newest medium, the electronic interpersonal medium, we have the opportunity to blaze a new more civil and more polite trail because we have in our collective grasp the power to control and direct its development. An opportunity maybe already lost in the conduct of our personal and global face-to-face relationships wracked with many undesirable developments.