Popular press and weblogs: the maximum value for occurences of the term [blog or weblog] occured in October, 1999 at 31, and the maximum number of articles published in April 2004 at 296.
The exponential growth of attention to the topic is striking, although it appears in the last month to have taper off. Comparing this trend with the average number of uses of the term per article, it appears that the more frequently the concept is cited, the fewer times the word is used per article. The obvious interpretation is that the term is slowly becoming part of our vernacular, and when journalists write about weblogs today, much less context is necessary than in 1999. Also, the number of articles exclusively about weblogs is probably on the decline, while stories only tangentially related to weblogs are on the rise.
Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communication: "Blogologists" assemble at our virtual roundtable to discuss how blogs are changing academia, politics and traditional journalism. They see them as being important, but school is still out on whether they are journalism.
The Twilight of the Information Middlemen: If blogs represent the uncoordinated efforts of countless volunteer writers, another information explosion shows the institutional might of the state. Taxpayer money still is behind a surprising amount of crucial data: nearly all weather observations and the supercomputer-based models that create forecasts; most basic scientific research; most research into disease causes and cures. In principle, this publicly financed knowledge has always been the public's property, but until a few years ago there was no easy way to get it from research centers to a wide audience. Thus various middlemen arose - notably scientific journals, which did the expensive work of printing and distributing research papers in return for steep subscription costs.
