When the internet was first introduced to me in seventh grade, I embraced it whole-heartedly. I would fight with my brother about whose turn it was to be online. I had friends in certain chat rooms and looked forward to talking with them. It was like my own little family.
As I got older, I stopped chatting in online chat rooms. I talked with my friends through instant messages and I would occassionally read their blogs. But I could never really understand why people wanted to put their own thoughts and musings online for other people to read. It just seemed so silly to me. That is, until I created one of my own. Livejournal connects me to family members and friends. I find that I can write my feelings better than actually talk about them, so friends can go online to see what I'm up to.
The blogging phenomenon is a movement that will create new forms of journalism, public discussion, interactivity and online community.
While no one is really sure where this is all heading, I think it represents the start of the weblogging revolution. Blogging will create amateur journalism as millions of internet users take on the role of columnist, reporter, analyst and publisher while writing their own personal thoughts. It won't happen overnight, and right now we're only seeing the beginning of this phenomenon, but wait a few years when broadband and multimedia fully emerge, and we'll see the importance.
The internet allows people to take on the role of journalist. "The Web gives voice to a lot of alternative points of view," Paul Andrews, co-author of the book, Gates (Doubleday, 1993) and who wrote How the Web Was Won (Broadway Books, 1999) said: "The role of the journalist is to ensure that the voice of the people should be exposed."
Bloggers can also read and respond to online articles, offering new insights to an old story, correcting mistakes or just commenting on the story as a whole. More people are taking up blogging and more of us are beginning to rely on blogs to help us shape our own personal media experience. Weblogging is already and important part of journalism. More writers are jumping onto the internet bandwagon and though we might not be able to predict just how important it will be for the media, we are already starting to see the effects.
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