什么是Blogosphere ？

有朋友在评论里问道：“什么是Blogosphere?"。在维基百科的英文版里有这个条目，中文版还没有人编辑这个条目。
Blogosphere (alternate: blogsphere) is the collective term encompassing all weblogs or blogs; blogs as a community; blogs as a social network. Weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read other‘s blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each other‘s blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture.
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The term bears a similarity to a much older word: "logosphere". In the Greek roots, "logo" means word, and "sphere" can be interpreted as "world", resulting in "the world of words", the universe of discourse.
 
大陆的blogger将这个blogosphere翻译成“网志空间”，实际上这个翻译的确是很难的，如何传神地把“生态系统”的概念给表达出来是一个很大的挑战。英文的维基百科对blogosphere的生态系统特性进行了详细的阐述：
Like any other biological system, the blogosphere demonstrates all the classic ecological patterns: predators and prey, evolution and emergence, natuaral selection and adaptation. The number of links obtained by a blog, is frequently related to the quality and quantity of information presented by that blog. That means, the most popular blogs have the highest link level, the worst blogs have the lowest link level. The blog ecosystem has its’ own selection and adaptation mechanism. The good tends to become better, the bad tends to disappear.
Through links and commentaries, the blogosphere with its’ self-perfecting mechanism, converts itself from a personal publishing system into a collaborative publishing system.
 
小容在早些时候写的文章《互联网上的CEO私人茶艺居》中间有一段小小的文字介绍了一下，里面提到研究人员John Hiler将全新的Blog交流机制构建的虚拟传播环境Blogosphere定义为“新兴媒体生态圈”。Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem 现在重新看看……
小容在那篇文章里提到：
而另外一本同期上市的《紫牛》也在提倡异曲同工的观点，那就是大规模电视广告工业的没落，而口碑传播的重新崛起，而这个回归有赖于全新的技术手段——互联网——来达成，现在的热门话题在Blogosphere的世界里，已经可以快速地跨越地域，在极短的时间里传播到网络世界的每个角落。前些日子，有关著名的网络公司Google的消息，接连不断此起彼此地在网络空间出现， 所以，小容感觉到一个全球性公关公司的CEO在公司的官方网站开设自己的Blog, 意味着行销传播业对 Blogosphere这一“新兴媒体生态圈”的肯定。
可以看看John Hiler在2002年5月28日写的这篇文章，
Blogosphere: the emerging Media Ecosystem How Weblogs and Journalists work together to Report, Filter and Break the News
by John Hiler
Trying to understand the complex relationship between bloggers and journalists has become my own personal Waterloo.
I‘ve taken a few stabs at it already, and learned a lot along the way.
Lesson One: Blogs can do a tremendous job breaking news, and journalists are wise to start their own to tap that power.
Lesson Two: Some rare bloggers become amateur journalists, a status which brings with it its own unique ethical challenges.
Lesson Three: Most bloggers are more like Columnists than capital-J Journalists.
Still no matter what I did, the weblog/journalism relationship seemed to defy reduction. No metaphor seemed complex enough to capture the subtleties of their interactions. I greatly enjoyed one set of metaphors from fellow metablogger Doctor Weevil:
blogger : journalist :: tick : sheep
bloggers : journalists :: dung beetles : elephants
 
在开始的时候，他有介绍一下blogsophere的定义：
INTRODUCING THE BLOGOSPHERE
Bloggers and Journalists form a blogging biosphere that has become an ecosystem in its own right, an ecosystem that one savvy blogger has dubbed the Blogosphere. The word was meant as a clever pun combining "Blog" with "logos", a Greek word meaning logic and reason. And while bloggers do often use logic in dissecting arguments, I love the word Blogosphere because it happens to capture another truth: the Blogosphere is a biosphere of its own, a Media Ecosystem that lives and breathes just like any other biological system.
Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere demonstrates all the classic ecological patterns: predators and prey, evolution and emergence, natural selection and adaptation. I‘ve often thought that anthropologists were best equipped to deconstruct the emerging blogging sub-culture, but now I‘m convinced I got it wrong: the greater mysteries of the Blogosphere will be unlocked instead by evolutionary biologists.
 
而后，他也介绍了一下blogosphere的生态系统特性：
BIRTH OF THE BLOGOSPHERE
Something about the Blogosphere gives it the feel of a living breathing ecosystem.
Like any ecosystem, the Blogosphere has a life of its own, one that‘s more than the sum of its weblogs. You can‘t understand a jungle by studying a single jaguar, and in the same way you can‘t understand the Blogosphere by studying a single weblog. Surfing the Blogosphere you can see evolutionary forces play out in real time, as weblogs vie for niche status, establish communities of like-minded sites, and jostle for links to their site.
But in order to understand the new Media Ecosystem, first we have to make sense of the Old Media Ecosystem. Let‘s start by following a typical news story across its natural life cycle.
 
他的这篇文章主要分析了新闻出版工作者和blogosphere的关系。通常，我们可以将整个媒体传播环境视为一个媒体生态系统，这样可以解释为什么有的东西传播得这么快，而另外一些东西传播得这么慢。作者在旧媒体生态系统的基础上加入了blogosphere的研究，这样线下空间和线上空间形成一个更大的传播生态圈，信息不断互相循环。作者画了一个图来表达这种信息循环，小容转贴这个图在这里给大家分享一下：