History of the term "Blogosphere"

When researching "blogosphere" on the three newspaper databases, I was unable to find any material on either the Chicago Tribune or The Los Angeles Times databases. However, I did find an interesting article on the New York Times database from May 5, 2002 entitled "At Large in the Blogosphere" by Judith Schulevitz. The article details the definition of a blog, what doesn't constitute a blog and what to watch out for when logging into the blogosphere. The discussion seems somewhat rudimentary and primitive; blogs, or "weblogs" as they were originally called, were viewed as a source of informal journalism and information acquisition. In an article from JStor, "Toward an Open-Source Methodology: What We Can Learn from the Blogosphere" calls upon political pundits utilizing the Internet to download political data during the 2004 presidential election. An abstract found on Project MUSE dated from 2005 brings up the concept of implementing blogging to college classrooms as a possibility to revolutionize learning.

What's intriguing about these articles is their progression. As time has gone on, and digital communication has evolved, the purpose of the blogosphere has become less focused on blogging for informational purposes, and more on communicating with others on specific interests and forums.

Today's blogosphere, it could be said, strikes a different chord. Rather than providing information and sharing different perspectives on relevant world affairs (which they definitely do, but not as much as initially predicted to occur, most likely), the blogosphere is viewed as a place of casual, more leisure-oriented activity centered on common interests. Oddly enough, this is exactly what Schulevitz claims is not an element of the blogosphere; "the super-personalized filters that social critics fretted would splinter the nation into a million tiny interest groups." Blogging sites like Tumblr and this one, Blogger, are geared toward allowing users to collaborate and share their own generated content, and interact with others over other self-generated content. 

It is possible that as the Internet has evolved over the last eleven years, there are now more options than ever to both write for informational purposes and to share common interests and opinions.