Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 129

access to and skills of using a computer can put news and information
on the Internet (provided that no limitations are put in place by, for
instance, undemocratic states; cf. Chapter 10 ). A most interesting new
development in this is the so-called webloggers or bloggers: personal
Web sites that contain up-to-date information that is usually not found
in regular media. Currently, at least every politician of some stature has
such a personal weblog, as well as many celebrities. But also numer-
ous 'ordinary' citizens have designed their own Web page and keep
these regularly updated with all kinds of information, personal views,
comments on news events, and discussion contributions. According
to Technorati, a weblog search service, in 2006 every day some one
hundred thousand new weblogs were established. 13
On numerous occasions, blogs proved to be an essential source of
countervailing information against major information disturbances;
or they proved a rich source of information where the large monop-
olies remained absent. Since September 2005, Google, the most used
search machine on the Internet, also searches in weblogs (in addition
to the normal searches in official Internet sites), giving evidence of the
increasing importance of these blogs for information collection. Eye-
witnesses publish their accounts in no time on the Internet, for instance,
on occasions such as the major hurricane disaster in New Orleans in
2005, when governmental information proved inadequate. But, at the
same time, blogs increasingly have been discovered by politicians, busi-
nesses 14 and the (old) media as useful sources for, or dissemination
channels of, information. At the major old media conglomerates, jour-
nalists constantly surf through the Internet to find blogs with new infor-
mation, making direct links between old and the new media. 15 Major

13

NRC Handelsblad, December 13, 2006, p. 21. In March 2007, the Technorati
Web site mentioned more than 175,000 new blogs every day. Bloggers update
their blogs regularly to the amount of over 1.6 million posts per day, or more
than eighteen updates a second (http://technorati.com).

14

In 2007, less than 5 percent of all large and medium-sized companies had a
corporate weblog. European companies were mostly lagging behind (2.5
percent), whereas U.S. companies were leading (with more than 14 percent).
Also, Asia-Pacific companies were greater than the world average, with 5.5
percent of the companies having a corporate weblog (LEWIS Public Relations,
2007 ).

15

For some examples of weblogs dealing with the environment, see
http://dominionpaper.ca/weblog/environment/ and
http://www.fumento.com/weblog/archives/environment/.