It was just a matter of time before economists started blogging.

Blogs, short for Web logs, have been populated by people wanting to share their personal lives with perfect strangers or political partisans needing a public outlet to vent their views.

Now, their influence is spreading to the world of economics, a realm that is near and dear to the hearts of fixed income investors whose decision to buy and sell bonds often feeds off the pulse of the American economy. A growing number of economists from prominent universities and even the Federal Reserve have joined the blogosphere in the last year, posting their thoughts on everything from the rise in oil prices to the future of Fed policy.

Many self-described news junkies have bookmarked the blogs, particularly since many of the memes – ideas that quickly spread online – have a habit of shaping the debate on the economy.

“It’s all about the memes,” the head of interest rate strategy at Fimat USA, Stan Jonas, said. “Those guys say it, and about a week or two later, the guys on Wall Street pick it up.”

Because bloggers provide a multitude of quick-links to other online postings, a thought developed in one place can quickly jump to other sites at the click of a mouse.

“This linking business is like a virus,” an economist and associate director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, David Altig, who launched his site, Macroblog (macroblog.typepad.com) a year ago. “I linked to somebody who started reading. Somewhere down the line, he linked to me. Then I became very visible.”

Visibility is what counts for many of these economists who, like other bloggers, have turned to this medium precisely to get their voices heard.

“Nobody was asking me to write a column, and almost all previous attempts to even publish op-eds were denied,” a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, Andrew Samwick, also known as Vox Baby (voxbaby.blogspot.com) said.

The top blogs in terms of the number of daily visits, still belong to those writing about politics. But the economists are making headway.

Longtime blogger Bradford DeLong, (www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type), professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and Barry Ritholtz, chief market strategist at the Maxim Group and the man behind The Big Picture (bigpicture.typepad.com), have cracked the top 100, according to the Web site www.truthlaidbear.com, which tracks blog traffic.

Most blogs have a bias. Some even read like rants. But the medium has given voice to those that are typically drowned out. And the more sober blogs have lent legitimacy to the medium for initial skeptics.

“I thought they were all wacko, and then I came across one a year ago” Mr. Jonas said. It was from Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker of the University of Chicago and his colleague at the School of Law, Richard Posner, and Mr. Jonas decided they were well worth reading. Now, he reads as many as 30, with one of his current favorites being www.econbrowser.com, penned by James Hamilton.

A professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, Mr. Hamilton began blogging this summer and already he’s a household name among his online peers who value his analysis as much as his industriousness when it comes to posting. “I did it in part because all my career I’ve been following oil markets,” Mr. Hamilton said. Fielding calls from reporters covering the rapid climb in the price crude, Mr. Hamilton decided to organize his thoughts more concretely. “I just decided to get more systematic about it.”

Little did he know that it would be more than just reporters who were interested in what he had to say. “People are really coming from all over the place,” Mr. Hamilton said. He figures from his feedback that 40% of his audience have an advanced degree in economics or finance.

It’s still early days for economists in the blogosphere and the question of whether they will complement or compete with those already firmly entrenched in the mainstream media has yet to be answered. But one trend is clear.

“Everyone uses online services,” an associate professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business and founder of the site Roubini Global Economics Monitor (www.stern.nyu.edu/globalmacro), Noriel Roubini, said. The site is a one stop Web site of economics research and blogs, including his own. “I haven’t stepped foot in a library in five years.”