Reality check
Let me remind you of something. The definition of a blog is simply a website that publishes updates in reverse chronological order. It is a platform, not a philosophy on journalism or the way the web should work. Time and time again I’ve seen statements like “such-and-such is not a blog because a blogger would never do [insert silly remark here].” Bloggers range from the amateur to the professional journalist. They allow and disallow comments. They link freely or conservatively. They have all sorts of MOs.
This is why I tend to roll my eyes when people start spouting generalities like “blogs aren’t for original reporting, they’re for conversation,” or any of the other myriad similar assertions, curmudgeonly or evangelical. It is a way of delivering content and has nothing to do with the content being delivered.
I also roll my eyes when people say they hate blogs. What’s there to hate? To hate blogs is to hate writing. People have some odd misconceptions.
One of my older co-workers asked me the other day what “blog” stood for. I told him it was short for “weblog” (he then asked why it wasn’t called a “wog”, which to me is an even uglier word than “blog”) and then elaborated on what exactly a blog is. All at once it came to me: an electronic soapbox.
i happen to like my little electronic soapbox. i talk about observations of human nature in news stories, life around me and i share discoveries i think others will be interested in.
just today a friend posted a comment on a topic i had yesterday. i had a post with a video for a band i had come across i thought has an interesting sound. he wrote he had bought all their albums as a result of seeing the video.
i love blogs. it is communication with the world. i can read blogs of people located in places that MSM is neglecting to report on with any depth.
it took me a second to even realize what blogs were when the term was popularized. by then i had already been playing with php & mysql for years. so i didn’t even realize packaging them would really offer as opposed to like free sites like geocities & angelfire.
but after observing the cultural shift blogs had forced on basic media institutions you can see how blogs would leave a bad taste in people’s mouths who don’t really live in that world.
their main sources of news were print, radio, and tv. all of which are losing market share to blogs.
old media uses media to taint the validity of new media. i think to be truely democratic everyone should have a voice. blogs allow for everyone to have the platform to speak.
so i see that it’s a platform but there is a social effect occuring. philosophies are appropriate when discussing blogs.
but yeah people will and do have a weird snobbery about blogs. i like asking people about their internet usage. seeing how they react to certain questions says a lot to me. i definitely hear tons of people turn their noses up at blogs.
the web log does show information in a reverse chronological order but it also opened the doors to novice webmasters to boom. because with open source and/or free things like wordpress and blogspot anyone could have a fully functional and operation website. prior to that you had to be able to afford to pay someone to build it, know a someone who did it and helped you out, or you were pretty computer nerdy like me.
combine that with adsense making it actually profitable to have even a small or medium online presence and the people who’ve been living in the big city get really weirded out when the beverly hillbillies come into town in swarms that jobs are lost.
sorry…typing makes me think faster so i start to ramble…
uhm, i guess i should just take that rant and turn it into a blog post…thanks for the inspiration to write…you just won a fan…lol…