Around 1994 the phenomenon now called blogging was little more than writing of online diaries. These days, there are blogs for everybody, including news blogs and commentary blogs, sites packed with links and ideas and arguments that for centuries before were the virtual monopoly of established news outlets. Blogs can be as well-sourced as traditional journalism, but they have the immediacy of talk radio. This much is clear : the phenomenon is real. Blogging is changing the media world and how journalism functions in our culture.
Somebody who had never realised how big blogging had become, was 30-years-old Heather Armstrong. She started her own blog at some point, like countless others around the world, inspired by what shed had seen other people achieve. She realised her blog was somewhat different, but she hadn't realised how different until she was fired. Traffic to her site sky-rocketed and bloggers all round the world went crazy.
So what was she doing that made her blog so different and turned her into an overnight blog celebrity-if there is such a thing as a celebrity in the virtual world where everybody is on an equal cyberfooting? Well,she was fired because she was writing what she tought was funny stuff about her colleagues. In an interview she said, 'I was naive. I was writing these carricatures of my colleagues. you must understand that I was working in a cold, dark office doing a job that had nothing to do with the product we were making. I didn't think anyone would be reading it'.
How wrong could she have been, because people were, and arem reading Dooce. Over 55,000 people log into it on a daily basis and the site has been awarded prizes for creative writing, wit and honesty. Needless to sa,there is no universal accalim (not everbody is overjoyed) and her use of language is often crude because she has an axe to grind. Some people find this kind of directness somewhat unsettling. She has changed the theme of her blog though, and writes about her personal experiences as a mother.
Ms Armstrong was the first person ever to lose her job over a website and this led to the term 'dooced' being used to mean losing one's website. Since then a number of people have lost their jobs in a similar fashion and blogging has become a worldwide phenomenon.
Blogging is getting more and more popular every day with over 1 million blogs already in existences and more being started every day. However, not all blogs are equally interesting to read. Anybody can write a blog : it's not just an activity for geeks! Soldiers fighting wars in faraway countries can report news from the front lines, prisoners writing from jail can describe their daily trials and tribulations, filmmakers who are working on a project can share their ideas and ask epople to contribute, and people who feel they have something interesting to say can launch their thoughts into cyberspace.
The number of blogs has grown so rapidly that the media has taken note. Many newas agencies, including BBC and The Guardian, now offer blgos while businesses have started blogging in an effort to appear more open and honest to their customers.
We have been blogging for more than a decade now and the phenomenon is on the rise. Is blogging a revolutionary medium for people to communicate through, or are we simply talking about a different way of keeping personal diaries that should, really, be kept private? Does the public nature of the acticity make a difference to how people communicate; will blogging eventually cause books to disappear? Is blogging to words that Napstar and Kazaa were to music? Is blogging a waste of cyberspace and an uninteresting form of reality TV, with millions of people writing thing nobody really wants to know about? Are blogging communities valuable social networks contributing to people's happiness?
Time Will Tell
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