Blogging is catching on here, but has it already peaked in the US, asks Haydn Shaughnessy

The Irish blogging community will celebrate its second annual awards ceremony tomorrow evening in Dublin. By the time the ceremony closes and the dancing begins at 10pm, 21 out of more than 100 shortlisted writers who regularly post their views and comments online, will be clutching their prizes and calling themselves best-in-category.

It is impossible to put accurate figures on the number of people blogging in Ireland, or on their total readership. But the fact that 100 sites are competing against each other tomorrow evening is indicative of a range of talent in the apartments, estates and rural bungalows of Ireland, all using this new medium to promote their views and interests.

Blogging is an outlet, some say, for egos and dreamers. It is also one of the few mechanisms that someone new to the media world can use to reach an audience. Blogging has helped these 100 writers, at least, win recognition.

The subjects of the blogs up for awards range from technology to in-vitro fertilisation, from food to politics, from council estates to drugs. There are few topics off the blogging radar, which is the main strength of blogs. While newspapers, magazines and television still trade in scarcity of space and resources, bloggers are free to wander.

But while blogging is still taking hold in Ireland, there is a sense that it may already have peaked elsewhere.

In the US, the blogging scene is settling down after three years of excitement. Daily KOS, a top political blog, is credited with re-establishing the credentials of the democratic left. It is now an established political resource. The Huffington Post began as an aggregator of opinionated blogs from across the political spectrum and became one of the dominant media influences in Washington. The Washington Post and other newspapers now run online sections made up of blogs from the public. Companies such as Blogburst sell blog posts to intermediaries such as the news agency Reuters.

Blogging has quickly become part of the vast and varied US media scene and no longer appears to offer up a challenge to mainstream points of views.

So has Irish blogging come into its own just as blogging's influence has begun to wane? In order to find out what bloggers thought of this, we put the following proposition onto a weblog (www.mediangler.com/2007/02/14/any-comments): "Blogging has peaked and Irish blogs have come into their own too late in the day".

Damien Mulley, organiser of the Irish blog awards, publicised the question on the awards' website and more than 30 bloggers, previous award winners among them, provided their own take on where Irish blogging is headed.

Fergus Cassidy, now a freelance journalist, believes the radical edge that characterised the early days of American blogging has yet to appear in Ireland for the simple reason that blogging here is still in its infancy.

It's a point taken up by Lisa McInerny, who writes under the pseudonym Swearing Lady. ". . . This year could be a massive one for the blogging community, obviously because we've got an election coming up. The fact that there are so many out there regularly publishing their thoughts and information the mainstream media may have ignored is something that's bound to affect the way voters think and decide . . ."

But others, such as the contributors to republican blog, 1169 and Counting, believe the noise created by so many blogs blocks out radical voices and the fact that some blogs are egotistical and poorly written allows the mainstream to dismiss all opinion that originates on blogs as being of little wider significance. Although more attention should be paid to bloggers, there are reasons, or excuses, why they are not.

My own view is that Ireland's cultural strength, its growing support for diverse opinions, may be its biggest political weakness. One of the exceptional traits of Irish blogging is its diversity of viewpoints. Whereas in the UK and US opinion tends to polarise and quickly follows established bipartisan lines, in Ireland a debate is likely to begin wide and remain so. But this may be an Achilles' heel if bloggers are to become a force for change. Entrenched political views are going unchallenged because the voices emerging on the web have inadequate collective strength. Arguably writers whose opinions matter must ultimately have an impact on political parties and their policies. But then, blogging was never only about politics.

Irish bloggers are keeping a collective account of arts and culture, politics, the culinary landscape, fashion and appearances, and the emotional experiences of living in changing times. Below and right are some of their views.