Power & Hierarchy

While many bloggers have been called self-obsessed, wannabe journalists (Baker and Green 2005, Cohen 2006:162), they are undeniably gaining popularity as a useful platform for advertisers (Clark 2005:106). According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, in 2006, companies spent 3.989 billion on online advertising alone, causing internet advertising to experience a growth of 1.1%. Online advertising is appealing to businesses for a number of reasons mainly because posts on blogs are stored in a database for a very long time but more importantly, because it allows advertisers to reach their target audience without doing too much work. In the case of food blogs, it allows advertisers to access a pool of people who are interested in food and all things food-related. Continuing from the example of 101 cookbooks and Amazon.com, Swanson’s section “New Cookbook Releases” and “Heidi’s Cookbook Collection” provides links straight to Amazon.com. This is an example of how Amazon.com can skip the process of reaching the wrong audiences by choosing the right blog to host their advertisements. According to Mosco (2004:168), Amazon.com's business is booming, one of the few which is making money from web advertising. Another example would be Gluten-free girl’s blog, where on the side panel of the blog, she has advertisements of ingredients and books that she makes constant reference to. It can be drawn as a parallel to advertisements placed in food magazine that are for the sole purpose of promoting a certain product only now, the online factor makes advertising more efficient by reaching a more specific audience (people who are gluten intolerant) in a much wider space. The next question is deciding which blog advertising companies will place their advertisements on which leads to the concept of blog hierarchy.

Whilst the idea that the internet and more significantly, blogging, is a space that is free from gatekeeping and editorial restrictions (Beecher 2005:70), the idea of bloggers having a hierarchy challenges the entire notion. As Cohen (2006) says, there is a level of ‘earned’ publicity that works within the blogosphere. This implies that there are obvious power differences between each blog and this disputes the notion of the utopian internet whereby everyone is supposedly ‘liberated’ on this democratic platform (Howcraft and Fitzgerald: no date). Blogs such as 101cookbooks, Vanilla Garlic and Gluten-free Girl are definitely considered high on the hierarchy scale as can be seen from the ‘authority’ scale on technorati.com which keeps track of all available blogs. 101cookbooks has an authority of 1, 453, Vanilla Garlic has an authority of 170 and Gluten-free Girl has an authority of 377. Authority refers to the number of references or links that have been made to a particular blog therefore, as can be seen, the above food blogs, these blogs have ‘authority’ as technorati.com so aptly puts it. Having a blog on the higher end of the hierarchy is like being an A-list celebrity, with the status comes the economic benefits of advertising and the ability to garnering even more publicity. The economic factor has been explored in the above paragraphs and to explore the idea of ‘free’ publicity this essay will look at articles that have featured their blogs. Vanilla Garlic has gained much publicity in the Sacramento area, where he is based, having been featured in a food website Sacramento Bee and the Sacramento News & Review. 101cookbooks has a much larger repertoire, having been featured in the New York Times, Food & Wine magazine and was a finalist in the 2005 Weblog Awards. Drawing this as a comparison to celebrities, the more popular a celebrity is, the more gossip and news there will be about them in the tabloids which then increases their celebrity status. This can then be seen as a continuation of traditional forms of power, where the more powerful get more power while the dominated will always be struggling to break this mould. As Wellman and Gulia (as cited in Jones and Kucker 2001:213) say, the internet is not a separate entity from ‘real’ life, they cannot be disassociated from one another. This therefore accentuates the point that despite the internet and more specifically, the blogosphere being a new culture, the paradigms of power and control are still extensions from the offline, ‘real’ world.