“Blog” is a new word for a new thing, formed from a contraction of “Web Log”. Huge swathes of the internet are blog-land, and if we (optimistically) apply Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crud”), the generous 10% of worthwhile blogs are an immense, insurmountable body of writing. Today we are writing more than ever, but we will be one of the least recorded generations in history – while paper lasts centuries and stone millennia, CDs might last 30 years if they avoid magnets – and volatile memory is exactly that.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
In Blogger’s words:
A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world.
Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.
(…) blogs have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others.
A feature of blogging that makes it a valuable platform for communication is immediacy.
All the reasons to write: relaxation and pleasure, reflection and refinement of thought, personal expression, and persuasion – all of these things can be done through blogging. The accessibility and arguable transparency of the internet makes it a perfect host for persuasive writing.
Martin Luther’s The 95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences spread quickly throughout Germany in two weeks and Europe in two months – thanks to the printing press. A great potential exists for the same in blogging, though the signal-to-noise ratio in a virtual space filled with unstoppable spewing blogs and a world filled with the literate and information overloaded is a starkly different environment. Some well-meaning blogs wish to be the spark in the flour-mill that starts the inferno, but every speck is already a flying ember in a fire-storm of dubious causes. Very little will catch.
Twitter is a microblogging platform wherein users post <140 character text-only banalities, though it recently received a huge amount of positive coverage for its role in the unrest in Iran after their 2009 elections.
Tumblr is a multimedia blogging platform, where users post photos, videos, quotes, text, viewing their subscribed feeds in one stream.
Blogger and WordPress are two currently popular, customisable and free blog hosts, in the traditional mould.
All these services are platforms for the democratisation of information, enabling each person to be not just a consumer but a broadcaster – often a waste. A newspaper at its best, says The Economist, holds governments and companies to account. There is no reason that a blog cannot do that. Unlike a journalist, a blogger has not necessarily had any training, and thus language and reporting ability might be underdeveloped, and ideas of journalistic integrity might be foreign.
There are many different blogging communities, defined by host, by interests, locations, needs, languages, causes, and styles.
Blogs are a significant enough pop-cultural force to be reported in “conventional” media, such as the Sunday Herald Sun’s report on the blog Things Bogans Like (“The bogan has taken to the Melbourne Cup like an aspiring actress to a terminally ill oil magnate”).
The White House maintains a blog, as do many political figures and corporations around the world, who appreciate it as a medium to communicate to the specifically interested person. As an example of cause-centred communities, there are feminist bloggers of many persuasions, also atheist blogs, parenting blogs, and many others.
In short, the blog is another way to communicate, with great potential and little prestige – both due to its inclusive nature.
[...] have already commented on blogging as a phenomenon in a previous post. I’ve read recently: “the more you blog, the easier it gets.” The same could be [...]
By: Blogging: a Retrospective « Bread you should have been prepared for on November 5, 2009
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