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Bloggers allied - Part II

A previous post looked at blogger alliances in the world. Though instead of 'world' I should really say 'English language Google & Technorati' because that's all I looked at. I will look at French and Italian at some point, but more interesting would be to look at Korea, China, Japan, India (though the latter would likely have turned up in English...), Russia, and so on.

There were not many, and I categorised them by the broad categories: Political, Religious, Hobby & Single Interest, and Blogosphere Centred. Now I'll try to summarise some of the characteristics of them. The first of which is that they were almost exclusively American (20 out of 22).

Geo-Political boundaries
Most of the political ones were based on bloggers within a certain constituency (for example, the state of Virginia), banding together to represent their interests online, in an extension of their offline political allegiances. The 'Kurdistan Bloggers Union' refers to an ethnic rather than a geo-political territory, and no doubt many of the bloggers there were not necessarily based in the region of 'Kurdistan': this offers one example of the transnational potentialities of the blogosphere.
Others that transcend (potentially at least) offline geo-political borders would be the religious ones (though one is locally based â€“ the 'SoCal [South California] Bloggers' Alliance') and the nascent 'Sci-Art Bloggers' initiative.

This one is a bit difficult to find out without further research, but some seem to be more individual initiatives, such as the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, while others have more of a collective base - Media Bloggers Association may be an example of this, though I don't know for sure.
Knowing the context of the founding of these groupings is important because then we can gain insight into their goals and motivations. For example, a single person might set up an 'alliance' and invite others to register and/or post simply in order to benefit (financially and/or socially) from the traffic on the website; a group effort is more likely to reflect particular social goals such as an effort to create a 'space' for contestation/alternative discourse. Continue reading "Bloggers allied - Part II"