A weblog is a public web site where users post informal journals of their thoughts, comments, and philosophies, updated frequently and normally reflecting the views of the blog’s creator. The term weblog is often shortened to the word ‘blog’, which represents both a noun (the website proper) and the activity of posting entries into the website (blogging). The rise of blogs has been made possible with the proliferation of the Internet. Its foundations can be traced to the Usenet newsgroup, which mimics the function of the bulleting board and allows users to post emails on it. It is moderated by a team of moderators and Usenet is still in operation till today. Later, a collection of journal postings was conceived by a man named Brian E. Redman, who ran a moderated newsgroup call mod.ber and collected interesting journal posts from all over the internet.
However, the modern blog emerged from something more personal, which is posting diary entries online. Users could then choose to publicise or make private these postings, and this further led to the genre of posting news journals online. Among the pioneers of news blogs are Matt Drudge of Drudge Report and other big-time news blogs are the likes of Little Green Footballs which is run by Charles Johnson. These sites have become pivotal in breaking news and publishing news that is often neglected or refused by the mainstream media. Closer to home, online personas such Jeff Ooi engage in citizen journalism and runs stories that do not conform the mainstream bias.
The Xinhua Press Agency, China’s central news agency reports that, among other things;
a) Nearly half of those online in Asia have a blog.
b) 74% find blogs by friends and family to be most interesting.
c) Young people and women dominate (except India where it is overwhelmingly a male domain and Korea where blogging is a part of everyday life for all).
d) 50% believe blog content to be as trustworthy as traditional media.
e) 41% spend more than three hours a week blogging.
An interesting thing that the report also mentioned was that politicians’ blogs fared poorly in popularity in Asia with only 14% interested in reading their blogs except in Malaysia where they were quite popular with 20% listing this type of blog as being of interest. This could be attributed to a similar predicament in China, where politics in the mainstream media is controlled on a tight leash and consumers have to turn to other media to read up political issues.
Blogs are the modern Gutenberg press, a revolution in the way in which humans communicate with one other and make progresses in the media in which information in disseminated. However, the advances afforded to us here and now with blogging are the realisation of Gutenberg’s dreams, being able to publish content quickly and cheaply and sent to a mass public in a matter of nanoseconds.
References
Blogging phenomenon sweeps asia, Xinhua press, viewed May 28 2007, <http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-28-2006/0004480819&EDATE=>
Penenberg, A 2007, Ready or not, china gets blogged, Wired magazine, viewed May 28 2007, <http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/05/67564>
