Task: Reflect upon what you have read about blogs. Consider various uses for blogs such as citizen journalism and personal blogging. Have you seen in your net travels any interesting uses for blogs?
Log entry: This unit gave me my first hands-on experience of blogging, and it’s illustrated both good and potentially concerning features about blogs.
The Good:
- Blogs can be very empowering. They give people the freedom to communicate their views, images, artwork, music etc. to a massive audience in an unprecedented way.
- Because blogs can be anonymous, they provide an opportunity for people to exchange their views with others in a relatively ’safe’ environment.
- Blogs are a tool that’s available for just about anyone with Internet access.
- From the readers’ perspective, this broadens people’s access to information, particularly on issues that wouldn’t necessarily be covered by ‘professional’ websites.
- Blogs by ‘everyday users’ also provide a different, often more personal, perspective to standard websites.
The Bad:
- Used unwisely or mischeviously, blogs can be a tool that causes personal or professional damage.
- Because of the persistent nature of blogs, a damaging post could remain indefinitely unless someone takes action to have it altered or removed. Even then, traces of the post can be difficult to completely remove, as demonstrated by the Baillieu blog story.
- Because blogs can also be anonymous and made by people with a casual rather than a professional interest, the opportunities for recourse may be more limited.
- Related to this, blogs can raise privacy concerns. Before posting information to a blog, authors should be aware that they’re making that information widely accessible. (And that a post or image that seems innocuous now might not be in the future…)
- Many blogs are just plain boring. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be made, but it can make it harder for people to find the ‘good stuff’.
Uses for blogs – Blogs are used for a range of purposes, from the original notion of keeping a web log or journal, to staying in touch with friends, or promoting a person’s professional concerns.
‘Blogs’ are also increasingly being used by companies such as media organisations (perhaps to counter the effect that blogs and the Internet generally have had on the role of printed media). Blogs help organisations to engage their customers / readers / users – for example, by posting an article and then allowing users to directly interact by providing a comment. However, this also raises the question of the distinction between a blog and a ‘normal’ website. One possible criteria is that the author of a blog should be unique and identifiable (even if anonymous), and not someone writing on behalf of a company or organisation.
