Politics of Technology

Three recent pieces in the Times on blogs and the politics of technology caught my eye.

First an editorial which cited some amazing numbers.

Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 percent of which remain active. Some 900,000 new blog postings are added every day – a steady increase marked by extraordinary spikes in new postings after incidents like the London bombing. The blogosphere – that is, the virtual realm of blogdom as a whole – doubles in size every five and a half months.

More numbers from a recent Pew study: Blog readership shot up 58% in 2004. 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators. But 62% of online Americans do not know what a blog is.

Second, the Times notes how the Philly bloggers were able to call attention to a missing woman, Latoyia Figueroa. Many felt that major papers and TV news stations had ignored her disappearance because she wasn’t white. (I had read about Latoyia’s disappearance on Leigh Ann Wilson’s blog last week.)

But the politics of technology isn’t just about blogging. There’s the whole topic of databank security. The Times notes that 2005 saw several high profile consumer breaches. Thieves have plundered the databases of several major corporations providing important financial information on ordinary Americans. Unlike European countries, Americans have been more comfortable with private companies holding this information than their government and have set up no major governmental office to regulate information. American exceptionalism again.

Has anybody seen a cross national study on blogging? If Europeans are more concerned with privacy issues, are they less likely to have a blog? Even strictly political blogs divulge a great deal of information about an individual. What regulations of the Internet exist in Europe?