Blogging: Just a fad or here to stay?
July 14th, 2008 by Ashley Hopkins
I recently read an interesting article on CnetNews.com regarding the future of blogging. According to its author, blogging is not a here today, gone tomorrow kind of medium; the author believe the technology is here to stay.
According to the poster: “The growth rate of blogs is impressive. Technorati, a search engine that monitors blogs, tracked more than 8 million online diaries as of March 21, up from 100,000 just two years ago. A new blog is created every 7.4 seconds. That adds up to 12,000 new blogs a day, 275,000 posts a day and 10,800 updates an hour.”
I don’t know how things look from your perspective, but from where I sit these numbers are huge! I read a lot of blogs, but I had no idea that so many people were subscribing. After thinking about this for awhile, I started to wonder what implications this is going to have for the future of online media.
With more blogs comes more information. Considering that anyone has the ability to publish content from the comfort of their own homes, it’s not surprising that there are now sites dedicated to practically anything you can think of, from wrestling to knitting, from action figures to gardening. As a journalist, I think it’s great. The world is our oyster, so the more information available at the hands of readers the better…right?
Not always. Bloggers may be passionate about what they’re writing about, but that doesn’t always mean that they know what they’re saying. With no editor to check for libel or obscenity, and with no fact-checkers to go over the specific details of a post, who’s to know if the information being provided is actually useful? It’s more important than ever for readers to take an active role in their approach to blogging, double checking everything they see with a more credible source.
But will blogging continued unabated? Some people believe that blogging is on its way out. Corporations often don’t have the time, money or manpower to support their blogs, and many times the sites are thrown to the curb in lew of more traditional advertising. Regardless of these trends, I don’t see an end to blogging anywhere in sight. More and more people are subscribing to blog networks each day, and after awhile corporations are not going to be able to ignore their benefits, both in terms of the traffic they generate and the conversations they create.
What do you think? Let me know by leaving me a comment below.
Related Posts
 |
|
|
|
 413 views |
|||
|
|||
July 14th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
What constitutes a credible source these days? It’s sad, not even the major news agencies are doing much fact checking anymore. Especially since deregulation. With the downward spiral of legitimate news it’s hard to know who or what source to trust when reading. I would have to say I probably trust institutions of higher education more than any other source right now.