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Posts Tagged ‘a blog’

It’s a very broad question to ask, “What is the use of blogging?” There are as many uses for blogs as there are individuals or even businesses. And that’s actually one of the answers. You can blog as an individual for personal interest, or you might blog for business purposes. A small business can make great use of blogs, keeping in touch with customers, while individuals might use their blogs as a diary or a place to store their own writings, or even as a link to a wider community. And of course blogs are used to disseminate news and gossip about public figures and events.

The community side of blogging is when it gets really interesting. What is just a site about your own health woes becomes much more when others with similar health issues gather to it and begin sharing advice and information. Your blog could connect you with others who love cats like you do, or read interesting books. Blogging in connection with a social media site could put you in touch with whole groups pursuing similar interests to you. And this could lead you to communities that are decidedly activist, with regard to politics or other good causes.

A political blog where all the writer does is attack opponents on the “other side” might be what is generally considered to be a mere vanity site, and a loud one at that. Yet political blogs serve as rallying points where information is logged and where strategy is formulated for ousting unethical representatives. People living under repressive regimes have made invaluable blog entries that bypassed government propaganda and revealed the oppressed lives or real people. Blogs have also been used as information and gathering sites for everything from the environmental movement to healthcare and education reform.

What’s blogged under the rubric of “community” can involve these banners under which people rally who are otherwise strangers. Or some might form a literal blog community where several people write on a single blog, or all have linked weblogs hosted on one site. Those involved in this type of community are more likely to know each other in person and be actual friends.

What is the use of blogging then? The answer to that depends on what you need. Whether you’d like to catch up on the gossip about famous people, become part of a community, or just record your own thoughts and reflections, blogs can serve almost any purpose you need. Nobody should be fooled into thinking that blogging is nothing more than placing text, graphics and photos on a web page.

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One of the newest developments in the blogging world is video blogging, which is adding a whole new dimension. It goes far beyond the formerly static blog posts that simply contained photographs, or even the more dynamic entries with active graphics. Blogging with video helps people bring information and opinion alive with more immediacy than simple text, and straddles two worlds that were once completely separate from each other; namely the printed page and film.

With a video blog entry, the primary means of communication is the video itself rather than the written word, although text will label or augment what the viewer sees, and can certainly be used within the video itself. But in many respects, this type of blog works the same as one that is mainly text-based. It is viewable on a regular blog page, will be updated regularly, and still involves the creator choosing what information or opinions to convey. Much of the structure on the website is also the same, with viewers given space for comments and interaction.

There is even blogging software designed explicitly for video blogging, in the same way that software was created for blogging with text. This is important, especially for newcomers who have digital cameras or camcorders and can capture the raw video footage, but are inexperienced in how to edit or post it properly. With the help of this software, a blogger can post clips of a useful length (usually 1-3 minutes long), and add titles, text, sound and music. The software even helps the person upload the final file to the blog itself.

Creating a video blog still isn’t as easy as a text-based blog however, so people also need to be aware of some potential downsides to setting up a blog for this type of medium. Just capturing and storing the clips requires many resources. The camera equipment needs to be good enough to create video that won’t embarrass the creator (or, for that matter, the viewers). Presumably the blogger will want to retain a copy of anything that is uploaded to the blog, and that will require storage space.

And since video files are not small, they may create a conflict between the blogger and their internet service provider. Just uploading these clips takes a lot of bandwidth, and some ISPs object to this high demand on their networks and subsequently put limits on people’s bandwidth usage. A blogger may be restricted, therefore, by what broadband connections are available and affordable.

Still, video blogging will undoubtedly continue to grow by leaps and bounds. Educators in particular have begun recognizing the value of using a blog with video clips in teaching, or using such blogs for classroom projects. Bloggers who want dynamic representation can even create video blogs for their personal portfolios. This sort of blog provides richer content for readers, viewers and the blog creator alike, expanding communication possibilities further than ever before.

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Viewing digital data from an historical perspective, the prospect of lost history looms as a very real threat. It may not seem that the deletion or loss of a few personal blogs could have that much of an effect, but the phenomenon is a symptom of something larger. Professionals in data management know too well that as a technology develops through four generations, the data created with the methods of the first generation finally becomes unreadable. This has implications for everything from blogs to photos hosted on websites to other kinds of records.

The situation with digital data parallels earlier changes in music technology. Think of the progression from cylinders to flat vinyl albums to cassette and 8-track tapes to CDs, not to mention mp3s. Who can play those music cylinders now? Similarly, a person’s digital diary on a 5 ¼” floppy disk would now be almost unreadable, as technology has progressed through 3 1/2″ disks to CD-ROM to flash drives. All that music and all that data is simple gone. If a person writes data about their whole life on blog entries, and the hosting company goes out of business, then where are that person’s thoughts and reflections?

Ironically, ancient records in archaic formats may be longer-lasting than digital data that can easily be lost. Historians can reconstruct Babylonian history from cuneiform tablets, and Egyptian history from hieroglyphs on monuments. Even America’s early history will remain known because it was written on paper, in letters, personal accounts and other documents. But if the software for blogging changes drastically in the next few decades, millions of blogs containing accounts and analysis of today’s history could become unreadable. Blogs are less easily preserved than a clay tablet or even a paper book.

On a smaller scale, blogs themselves are constantly vanishing, as people move them to new servers, start new ones, or simply stop updating altogether. Members of a blogging community, having no other way of knowing the person, lose touch and may never discover what happened to their friend. The blog posts sit there until the host site archives them or deletes them for inactivity, and the person is gone from online history.

As record-keeping continues switch to digital formats and away from paper that might still have been readable a century or two from now, the question of lost records grows in importance. The expense alone of continually upgrading records to new, technological formats is very high, so as people rush headlong into those technologies, they simply resign themselves to losing older data. With the disappearance of the weblogs of ordinary people, as well as those making history, and even people’s simple deletion of their own email, data is vanishing that might leave huge gaps in the future understanding of current world events.

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With the current popularity of blogging and with thousands of new blogs springing up every day, it’s not surprising that one of the biggest segments of growth is the celebrity blog. This doesn’t just refer to blogs written by celebrities themselves (or, in some cases, their publicity people). In fact, the famous people’s sites are probably in the minority, compared to the thousands of news blogs written about them, both by fans and professional star-watchers.

It’s likely that these news blogs, perhaps better described as gossip blogs, came first, and that part of the reason celebrity blogs began to appear was in response to these, so the stars could take back some control of their image. But for a few years, blogs that gossiped about celebrities reigned supreme. This was no surprise, of course, since wildly popular newspaper tabloids like the National Enquirer and magazines like People had been serving a similar purpose for decades. The public has always had a high interest in juicy tidbits about the rich and famous.

But the interest in the stars, thanks to blogs that gossip about them, has attained a level that goes well beyond anything previously seen. A celebrity used to need to avoid the prying eyes of newspaper reporters and television camera crews, but even tabloids and gossip magazines have reason to be envious of the publicity achieved by the new blogs. Even fans are now suspect, posting public photos that might make the stars cringe.

Sports figures, of course, are not immune either, with sports blogs following the gossip trend, running items about players’ love lives or speculation about drugs or illegal activity. And politicians are now major targets as well, having achieved a greater level of celebrity than ever before. However squeaky clean they might portray themselves, if they’ve got a skeleton in their closet, or even just an old finger bone, then someone is going to find them out and make a blog post about it.

It’s no surprise, then, that stars also began their own weblogs, maybe to counteract the rising cacophony of unrelenting gossip. The phenomenon of blogging has been a boon to both sides of the relationship, in fact, since famous people can also get their preferred message out to millions of people. While you have gossip blogs like www.perezhilton.com or www.tmz.com on one side, on the other you have famous bloggers like Bruce Willis, Barbra Streisand, the very popular and prolific comedian Margaret Cho, soccer star David Beckham, famous chef Jamie Oliver, home style diva Martha Stewart, writer Neil Gaiman, and on and on. The blogosphere is crowded with celebrities of every description.

Bloggers who gossip about the stars may in fact have altered the public news landscape, and not for the good. Noting the obvious popularity of celebrity blogs, even more traditional news organizations have begun including this sort of gossip in their own publications or broadcasts. If responsible, well-researched journalism is fading and the prying gossip of millions of peeping toms is what “journalism” has become, then this could perhaps sound the death knell for reliable news.

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