The Blogosphere Reflection

Through reading this article I found out that blogging isn’t what I thought it would be. In my mind I thought it would just be “inspirational and informational” collections of self-written articles, but about observational themes going on in the world, kind of like a news outlet mixed with social media. I seen blogs as a way for journalists to express their opinions more in depth than a regular news article. This perspective of blogging was formed by just what I heard from the internet and media. Before starting my own blog through this class, I didn’t really know much about blogging, I had never really read any or started my own. But now through not only starting my blog but reading these articles about blogging, I have a better idea of how they work and the community of it. This “community” is called the “blogosphere,” basically everybody that either has a blog that doesn’t really blog or has a blog and regularly blogs. From reading this article my perspective on who blogs and what the atmosphere around blogging is like has changed because the research provided by the Perseus Development Company suggests that most of the blogs that are created are abandoned because of inactivity. And that there are more than one type of blog, such as the “diarist” blogs and the “conversational” blogs. So with this information I now realize that the “Blogosphere” is made up of people that like to blog daily and have an interest in doing so and people that only want to do it just to try it and the information that either put out is either personality based or event-based. I also didn’t know the story behind how blogging got it’s popularity, it did so mainly because of the 9-11 terrorist attacks in New York. You get both perspectives of what happened that day from bloggers and newspapers/media outlets. The aspect that blogging had that the news didn’t were first hand accounts of what was happening, bloggers were actually typing what they saw while the destruction was going down. The media just had coverage of the second plane hitting and they generalize what everybody was feeling and what actually took place. There are many differences between blogs and media; blogs are non-profit and the media covers it for the money, blogs are described as a gift economy whereas the media is described as a market economy, and so on. This article covers the advantages of blogging over newspapers and traditional media, for example, it’s a democracy, meaning that anyone that has the requirements to blog (computer and internet access), can. A good example that they write about is the story of Kevin Barbieux of the “Homeless Guy” fame, in which this homeless guy decided one day to start blogging through the computers at a local library and continues to do so to this day. But a downfall to blogging is the access to a computer or internet, many poor countries can’t afford that many computers and in Bangladesh for example you can get internet if you are in the middle to upper class. In conclusion blogging can be a good way to express your feelings and whatever is on your mind because you have the freedom of writing whatever you want whenever you want if you are a blogger and blogging seems to be getting less popular with the rise of social media platforms.