Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Why YOU should join the blogging revolution- State of the Live Web Response

As a student of MIT, I have certain areas of study I enjoy much more than others. One particular area I enjoy and find fascinating is Grassroots media. I think grassroots media and blogging have great potential, and judging by Sifry’s Alert from April 5, 2007- The State of the Live Web I’m not the only one.

This article uses information from Technorati to show just how popular blogging is and the figures are, well, astounding! I mean check out these stats:

· 70 million weblogs
·
About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...
·
1.4 new blogs every second

Blogging is still fairly new, so the web 2.0, sharing, networking revolution is only getting bigger. More and more people are looking for news sources outside main stream media to either supplement or replace the usual formats. Lately there have been more and more accounts of media fraud uncovered by bloggers, For example During the Israel–Hezbollah War of 2006, bloggers caught Reuters publishing doctored images from Lebanon (you can read more about that on First Monday article Reviewing Fauxtography). And remember when bloggers proved CBS had used fake memos to document a story about President George W. Bush’s national guard service right before the presidential election?

This is why blogging is so important; people can seek out new opinions, ideas, and sources (and judging by outfoxed this is totally necessary).

Blogging also allows for networks of bloggers to work together creating communities of similar interests and ideas. Blogging helps you keep current, explore interests, and develop ideas. This is another reason why tagging is handy. Tagging allows users to so easily search for terms, connect different ideas, and share their own ideas. So bloggers, take advantage of built in tagging systems, explore del.icio.us, and stumbleupon things! (Can you Digg it?)

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