Whose Blogosphere is Five Years Old?

I was intrigued by a recent Washington Post article about grumblings — LOUD ones — by black bloggers who say they weren't given enough credentials as "official bloggers" for the Democratic Convention.

The Post's Jose Antonio Vargas writes:

"OK, folks, black bloggers to the back of the bus," read one post on the African American Political Pundit, one of the more prominent national black blogs. A posting on Georgia Politics Unfiltered, a state blog, read: "Jim Crow raises his ugly head . . . at the Democratic Convention."

But the article also says:

In the growing political Web, many of the most popular liberal blogs — save for DailyKos, created by Markos "Kos" Moulitsas Zuniga, whose heritage is part Latino — are run by white men, as was evident at last year's YearlyKos blogapalooza, the gathering of the who's who of the netroots crowd. It's not because the blogosphere is racist, bloggers say, but because, at about five years old, it is still evolving.

It's a great article and while the blogosphere is still evolving, I argue that it is far more than five years old. There have been blogs for far over a decade; what has changed is both the volume of blogs and — particularly critical in my opinion — the volume of "meta-blogging," with bloggers blogging about, well, other bloggers.

There have also been blacks in the blogosphere for many years, well before it had a "business model" and could help pay your rent.

Chris Rabb founded Afro Netizen in 1999. He was one of the 40 credential bloggers at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

Longtime blogger Steven Gilliard was the first blogger memorialized in the New York Times Obituary Page. He ran The News Blog (now, sadly, archive only) and played a critical role in The Daily Kos.

I personally started the blog PopandPolitics.com in 1995. It's still alive; now in its 12th year; run and written by students at the University of Southern California. It's been nice to pass the torch.

Not everyone who started blogs keeps running them. Some people, like me, pass the torch. Others go from doing one blog to the next. And yet others, of course, shut down their blogs. (It is SO much work ... often for no money.)

I'm curious, though, how many old school black bloggers are still out there ... people who started blogging five years ago ... and what you think of the changes in the blogosphere. Search engine technology has completely changed the game; but the game can be gamed by things like sneaky cheater-ly search engine optimization.

In any case, you know we LOVE the people on our Bloggers' Roundtable here at News & Notes ... and I also have to find out if any of our folks are going to be credentialed at the elections.

You can see some of the sites our Roundtable bloggers produce if you scroll down the right hand side of this blog.