If you are as new to the subject of blogging as me and trying to get some first insight, you might find this post useful.

After spending some time on looking around and reading various bits about the blogosphere, I looked back at what I was actually trying to find and created an issue tree. Let me present:

Now, this may not be the most perfect issue tree around. The main question is not exactly laser focused. And there are no hypotheses. Some areas may not be there, since I consider them out of my scope at the moment.

Still, it works for me. I can use it to see what areas I already know something about and which may be still worth further examination. It can also serve as an agenda for some more writing, with focus on a selected components of the big picture. And I can always refine it while moving on. For now I?m happy with what I?ve got. But, if you have any issues with my issue tree, I will be glad to know your comments.

Let?s see what?s inside the boxes.

What are the examples of blogosphere influence?
Blogosphere success stories are fun to read. They include the latest and still ongoing PR disaster of Sony (with two more lawsuits today, it?s even more than PR disaster). At the moment all the examples that I found show how destructive the wraith of the blogosphere is for its target. But I allow possibility for some positive cases existing, so I changed the name from original ?blog victims?.

Also it may be interesting to look at individual blogs which make a difference. I made some initial attempt to see what these top blogs are here, but maybe later I will come back to the problem. The main issue here is how to tell which blogs are influential. There is a connection to the third question, since appraisal of blog?s influence depends on the yardstick that you use.

How the blogosphere exerts its influence?
First of all, there is an interesting view of a select group of ?elite? blogs, sitting on top of blogosphere and acting as ?focal points? for the whole system.

They catch up worthy pieces written by less popular authors. Even if the latter don?t have a mass audience, they often happen to be subject matter experts. Because of that, they are able to dig up issues, like Mark Russinovich did in case of Sony?s DRM malware. ?A-list? blogs expose such findings to millions of visitors.

When the buzz reaches critical mass, professional journalists find it hard to ignore the issue and the story finds its way to mainstream media. That?s how blogosphere sets the agenda.

If you like to know more after this brief introduction, ?Web of influence? by Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell is a great reading.

How can influence be measured?
Here come all the numbers. How to measure blogosphere? Millions of blogs, but most are already dead. Hundreds of thousands daily posts, but how many are spam?

Another approach to understand blogs? influence is to investigate how many mainstream journalists read them.

Then there is a problem of estimating importance of a single blog. The blog can have direct influence through a mass of its own readers, but another view is to see its position within the blogosphere.

This brings us to blog search engines subject. So far my experience with them suggests there are at the moment rather far from perfect, even compared to search in non-blog web. At first glance this search niche doesn?t seem to be a mature market at all, moreover, Google is not a dominant player (yet). An interesting topic as well.

I still don?t know how far I?m prepared to go into this whole blogging subject, but I will keep you updated in case of any progress.