Mmmm...chocolate!

This next topic is where I got my idea for my sign-in name for this blog...

The phrase, ‘Scandinavian flavoured hypertext weblog cluster’, was coined by Mark Bernstein, a chief scientist at Eastgate Systems (Bernstein, 2000). As Bernstein asserts, it is “one of the best places in the world to read about new developments in new media” (Øvrebø, 2004). This notion suggests that when someone stumbles across an area that interests them on the Internet, they have the power and capacity to leave behind what Anders Fagerjord called a ‘surftrail’ of ideas (Mortensen and Walker, 2002).

Yet Bernstein criticizes bloggers for having relationships between themselves, not between ideas (Bernstein, 2000). Blogging has become more a locus for social interaction than the interlinking and evolution of ideas and thoughts. Bernstein questions whether comments reduce writers’ desire to link (Bernstein, 2000) whilst writing blogs. The bloggers once active in the ‘clustering’ of ideas no longer respond to posts the way they used to (Øvrebø, 2004).

Fagerjord argues that blogs and the idea behind them is still present, yet the intense academic and theoretical discussion has vanished (Fagerjord, 2004). This seems to contradict what blogs stand for, as people enjoy the freedom and easy access to blog content, whilst being able to critique or compliment it easily. The number of blogs in cyberspace is increasing, but their academic content may be slowly decreasing. On the other hand, the number of posts dedicated to political discussion and socially relevant topics such as global warming are multiplying at an extraordinary rate. Relevance and issues of major concern are what people nowadays want to discuss at length and to try and resolve, hence the exponential growth of blogs - because people want to have a say on these issues and to discuss them with other people with differing beliefs.