How often do we talk glibly about the blogosphere as if it were one homogeneous entity? But is there more than one blogosphere? Maybe there are hundreds, even thousands, broken down by language and cultural values. Could the blogosphere be less like a whale and more like a pod of dolphins?

In this piece I’m proposing that we break it down across the board, by motivation, into Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary blogospheres.

The Primary blogosphere is all of those kids and grownups blogging to their friends, chatting about Harry Potter or Star Wars ~ MSN Spaces writ large. “Blogging” as a topic of discussion means nothing to them. Connection is what it’s about, how it happens is unimportant. They probably make up the majority of bloggers.

The Secondary blogosphere contains the purely-for-business blogs. They exist to sell products and services and are usually tied to companies or organizations. They probably represent the second largest chunk of the blogosphere.

The Tertiary blogosphere comprises all those folk who talk endlessly about “the blogosphere”. Recognize them? They are serious bloggers, info-providers, probloggers, A, B, and C-listers, people who use blogs to sell themselves and their ideas ~ what H.G. Wells called “the originative intellectual workers”.

I’ve found that when thinking about the controversies that rage around the blogosphere from time to time, applying them to the whole package just garbles the argument. If one examines them against the dynamics of the Tertiary blogosphere, more satisfactory conclusions emerge.

Tertiary blogging is at the same stage in its cycle as the pamphlets and broadsheets that were handed out in the streets of 18th-century London. Way back then, some businesses saw the commercial possibilities of them and the best people were drawn in and consolidated. Today’s mainstream media grew out of that movement. Now the mainstream is giving way as the best of the pamphleteering blogs and bloggers naturally coalesce.

The vertical divisions, language etc., are less useful than the horizontal ones, which keep the whole thing inclusive and avoid racial, gender, cultural stereotyping. Motivation is what divides the blogosphere, and while the threefold division doesn’t tell us everything, it gives us a better understanding of the “media” values of the Tertiary set, and why the MSM are fearful they’re being superceded by something they don’t fully understand. The cutting edge of the media is now almost always played out within the Tertiary blogosphere.

The only real danger I see to the Tertiary blogosphere is not that it will stop growing, but that it won’t, and will eventually choke itself off. Then a few coherent voices will emerge, just as the big newspaper titles did back in the more ordered world of the 19th century.

History always repeats itself, but in a more modern guise. The Tertiary blogosphere has a great future, but expect to see a few giants emerge over time.

Update: Thanks to Duncan Riley over at the Blog Herald for writing about what he calls the Syntagma Theory of the Blogosphere. Some interesting comments coming in too. Dave Winer has caught the crux of the tertiary blogosphere in this post : “Microsoft’s new network of blogs is so hard to understand it’s hard to understand how it could be of any consequence. What would matter, what would be killer, is if they flowed some of their hundreds of millions of page views per day through the existing blogosphere. The unwashed, unedited, politically incorrect, interesting, sphere of people writing about stuff they know and believe in. Instead they’re creating a space of nameless corporate writers. Where is the interest in that?”

Update: Since writing this post I’ve refined the definitions of the three blogospheres. Take a new look at them here : Three Blogospheres Revisited.