Canadian blogosphere

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Canadian blogosphere is used to describe the online predominantly English Canadian community of weblogs that is part of the larger blogosphere.

Canada has one of the highest internet penetration rates in the world. Of Canadian internet users, a recent poll suggested that over 42% had read a blog in the previous three months.

1 Political blogs
2 Political blogs as watchdogs
3 Blogs and authority
4 Trivia
5 Corporate Blogging
6 External links

[edit] Political blogs

Main article: Political blog

Though Canadians compose blogs on many topics, weblogs of a political nature have a particularly high visibility in Canada. Former prime minister Paul Martin kept a high-profile blog during his campaign for leadership of the Liberal Party. Monte Solberg kept a widely read blog while he was in opposition, but ended blogging after being named Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. Former Jean Chrétien advisor, Warren Kinsella's blog enjoys a similarly high profile. The contents of political blogs have been used to both defend and attack politicians in Parliament. Canadian comedian Rick Mercer also keeps a blog that frequently pokes fun at Canadian politicians.

The Calgary Eye Opener is an independent, "contrarian" blog identifying with Bob Edwards's Calgary Eye Opener of the early part of the 20th Century.

Jim Elve of Blogs Canada was the first to create a directory of Canadian blogs. After developing a rich ecosystem of individual bloggers in the early [2000s, the political part of the Canadian blogosphere began to organize itself into larger groupings based on broad political ideology (left-right politics), party alignment (New Democratic Party, Liberal, Conservative) and geographical location (province or city). Membership in several groups is common.

The largest political blog group are the right leaning Blogging Tories with 300 blogs and 30,000 readers on average every day. More recently, Liberal and NDP bloggers, many of whom are "Progressive Bloggers", have joined to create Liblogs and Blogging Dippers. The environmental Green Bloggers have about 90 Canadian Bloggers. There is also a group of non-partisan Canadian bloggers, committed to no particular party, called The Blogging Alliance of Non-Partisan Canadians.

MP Garth Turner's blog is the only active blog from Canadian MPs. He was recently ousted from Conservative caucus because of comments contained in his blog.

[edit] Political blogs as watchdogs

Canadian bloggers in their role as citizen journalists also hold elected politicians up to increased scrutiny. The How'd They Vote? website, set up by blogger Cory Horner mines Hansard for MP's voting history, attendance records and number of words spoken in Parliament. New Democrat MP Pat Martin said this website was "serving a public function" and "motivating MPs to do a better job." Liberal MP Paul Szabo was determined to be the "parliamentary windbag” of the 38th Parliament with 107,873 words spoken.

[edit] Blogs and authority

In March 2005, fulltime Canadian tech blogger Jeremy Wright was detained and strip-searched by U.S. Immigration while crossing into the U.S. because he told officials his occupation was "blogger." (see [1]).

[edit] Trivia

Many high-profile Canadian blogs, like those of political insider Warren Kinsella or Maclean's journalist Paul Wells, do not allow reader comments out of fear of libel action. As a result, Canadian bloggers set up the website Comments Please to allow commenting on these high-profile blogs in one place. In October 2005, Wells asked his blog entries be removed from the Comments Please website, citing two hazards of the blogosphere: constant personal abuse and ranting attacks on politicians. Comments Please suspended service in March 2006 due to impersonation and "increasing libelous material." [2]

Marc Weisblott, writing for the since-defunct music site redseat.ca in 2002, was Canada's first professional blogger.

[edit] Corporate Blogging

Though adoption rates are still low, in 2006 Maggie Fox founded Social Media Group, Canada's first company devoted exclusively to helping Canadian firms use corporate blogs and other social media for marketing and communication purposes.