Global Blog, Weblogs and Blogosphere, innovation processes and web environment - Global economy in relation to success of STPs

The word blog is a loan from English where it was originally an abbreviation of the word weblog. Blog is a general term for a large quantity of pages in the web environment, for which the original Finnish concept was web diary, net diary, sometimes even weblog or log. This global and general concept has no genre of its own, it is culture bound and in the early stages of its innovation process. Often it is characterised as new media and used in communication, companies and many institutions as a part of their interest group relations. The bloggers of the web community form a blogosphere or a blogostan. Today, there are about 50-70 million active information producers in the global blogosphere and the number is growing by about 10 000 every day. In the economy, the blogosphere is close to the network or cluster economy as an interactive, multidimensional and multicultural process that is constantly changing and expanding. It can be considered the largest global factor related to innovations and their diffusion for the web environment, the individual person, the community, society and the economy, as well as the largest social and cultural phenomenon since the birth and spread of the internet. Blog and blogosphere research in the web environment can be divided into the following tasks: 1) The research tries to identify a set of tools with which the scientific community can operate in the new web environment in a creative and innovative way. The aim is to create new global sense of community at the same time and to look for means for enriching the multicultural capital unlike the more traditional media environment that distributes information in one way in a hierarchical manner. 2) The second task is related to communication that can cross cultural borders and is not hindered by hermeneutical thresholds or the cultural practices of producing or receiving information. Answers are sought to the question of how the new web environment shapes sociologically and spatially in the new information economy. 3) The third set of tasks studies the structures of blogs and the cultural differences between them as well as the global variance in producing and receiving the information of the web environment. At the same time, the differences of the web environment compared to other organisation of society, networks and the producer-consumer structure are deductively studied. The research material is from 2000-2006. The newest material is wholly related to media and blogs and the differences between these. The material acquired earlier mainly interprets the network and cluster structures and innovation processes related to consumers and entrepreneurs, as well as the analyses, reporting and modelling of these. The methods include multivariate methods designed for processing of large masses of data, factor and cluster analyses and structural or delphoi-type intuitive step-by-step processes. Multicultural and large materials have called for a deductive approach alongside and partly instead of the more traditional inductive view. In the future, "hard" methodology of sociometrics must be increased as well as a grid-type use of networks that draws from it. This applies also to other research on the methods of planning in understanding the web environment and in cross-scientific study, but especially to expertise and modelling of regional and quantitative geography. In rural studies the web environment is an especially wide research topic and in innovation research alone it covers targeted innovations, process innovations, organisational innovations and market or marketing innovations. Web environment research naturally covers all diffuse processes of rural areas concerning diffusion models, communication models, interaction models and network and cluster models. The web environment is the most important rural development target in all key sectors of innovation policy: technology-based, science-based, cost-based, customer-oriented or generic innovations as well as innovations based on regulation. Innovation in the rural areas is mainly pragmatic and mechanical whereas in the web environment it should be mainly processing and constructive. Rural areas should be directed into the permissive direction of the divergent process and in the direction of reflective radicalism where the web environment provides the final release from the boundaries of regionalism. Blogs do not appear as a complete and organised system in the network consisting of known networks or operators. For many active blog producers it must be already important to realise that the web exists. For companies, the blog is a means to link ones already established networks to a loose and interactive environment free of hierarchical responsibilities. From society's point of view, this is a task to be urgently managed at the phase where we move from web 2 to the next phase that bypasses broadbands and introduces various, as yet little known social, economic and psychological effects of the new web environment, but also policy factors. The blogosphere resembles the cluster in many ways. It is often problematic to observe this if one only acts as a producer of content for a blog. Official and unofficial links as well as mainly immaterial network links are involved. The blogosphere was born largely on the basis of non-economic relations of the traditional network economy, consequently, the significance of informal contacts and the measuring of these was paid special attention also there. The neglected parts of the hard method expertise of societal research have diverted us from the topics where the mere language of technology is strange for use in the near sciences and the cross-scientific aspect is not realised. The blogosphere is a network of networks, in the same way as a grid has been visualised as the data network of future data networks. Together, these form a kind of a global meganetwork. In the blogosphere, persons participate in the activity as individuals and with their whole personality, not as reflections of a certain role or institution, culture or organisation. The sense of community manifests itself there as in society in general, gaining constantly in diversity and richness. The full spectrum of life is realised already in many processes of the blogosphere. The web environment and networks (web 2) are only a product of computer technology, not yet their social and psychological process that changes the spatial world and cultures. This process is not know and this is an attempt to shed some light on it.\nWhereas the traditional network or electronic media is a hierarchical process, the interactive blogosphere with at the most bidirectional messaging describes the relations between persons. This functional network describes how the persons interact with one another and receive different roles of the global world there. This is impossible to observe if one was not born into the new technology and does not master its language, symbolism and the way to process in the field of new media by living in it and by recognising its own symbolism When the blog is compared to traditional media the largest difference is in interactivity and in the degree of real time operation. Traditional media even in its electronic form relays news whereas the blogosphere creates them. Blogging and writing a piece of news, a column or a scientific article are different things and should not be confused. The blogosphere does not differentiate between the blogs of a researcher, an editor or anyone else by other rules than those of the evolutionary (cluster economy) process. Here, the blogosphere is rational, multicultural and appreciative of its own, e.g. creative class for the innovation process. This appreciation emerges in a different way than e.g. in a culture that is purely pragmatic. The innovation process proceeds differently in the web environment than in an environment characterised by one culture or process or reception of information. It is not guided by external factors and the factors enhancing diffusion are found elsewhere than in the original source of innovation. Diffusion does not happen in surges nor does it recognise spatial borders or cultural differences in the same sense as a traditional society, organisation or community does. In practice, the web environment changes all our traditional ideas concerning organisational research, but also our localisation theories. Four large homogeneous main groups and two relaying groups can be created along the main axes by factor interpretation and by clustering of the factor points. The first of these is the diverging telecity innovator group representing the creative class, the second one a processing and sub-innovative but converging group of postmodern ramblers or flaneurs, the third one a pragmatic and harder group of intrepreneurs and the fourth one the group of gamblers that has the weakest morale. In addition, two large relaying groups emerge, where the values of eastern and western main cultures (postmodern theosophes and tourists) integrate into a kind of theosophic materialism. In Finland, the groups of the Helsinki area and large cities do not differ much from the rest of the blogosphere. Our own blogosphere is more homogeneous and is weighted almost entirely on the first factor. Also, it has more of the ecological cluster than e.g. in the entire global model. Rotating the factors or engineering the variables causes less variance than the exclusion of major blog areas. The structure changes the most by excluding the European blogs from the model. Spatially, global variance is greater on the north-south axis than the east-west axis. In the processing and reception of information Asia is closer to Africa but in the production of innovation the United States and a few metropolis dominate, often with the width of the key cluster (creative class). The processing and separation of information, its areas, interests and acquisition happen as a task breaking the invariance and are analogous to the protein synthesis. The process is extremely rapid, self correcting and easiest to understand with a social philosophy where the given laws are critically mystified, also in natural sciences. Behind the processes, there are conflicts of interest that direct behaviour, but also persons who are in principle free.