Conversational Blogging
What is a blog? Most newspapers, when they don’t have too much time to elaborate, define a blog as a ‘personal online journal’. That analogy is not completely wrong nor is it entirely right. Where they differ is that conventional journals start and finish in a chronological order, whereas blogs are displayed in reverse chronological order with the most recent entry on top. Of more importance is the fact that the definition above completely misses the main point about blogs. Conventionally, journals were private or even secret affairs, and were never linked to other journals. Blogs, by contrast, are social by nature, whether they are open to the public as a whole or only to a small select group.The word “blog” was first used in 1997, when one of the few practitioners at the time, Jorn Barger, called his site a “weblog”. In 1999, another user, Peter Merholz, lightheartedly broke the word into “we blog”, and that was the beginning of the new term-blog-which stuck as both a verb and noun. Technically, it means a web page to which the owner regularly adds new entries, or “posts”, which are inclined to be (but need not be) short and frequently contain hyperlinks to other blogs or websites. Besides text and hypertext, posts can also contain pictures (“photoblogs”) and video (“vlogs”). Each post is stored on its own distinct archive page, the so-called perma-link, where it can always be found. On average, Technorati, a search engine for blogs, tracks some 50,000 new posts an hour.
Blogs usually have a raw, unpolished authenticity and individuality. This wouldn’t include a lot of blogs that firms and newspapers set up in this day and age. Thus the initial appeal of blogging is as an outlet for pure self-expression. Thus expressing an opinion is only the start. Many adolescents and teenagers consider e-mail as belonging to their grand-daddy’s age and instead are using either instant messaging (IM) or blogging for communicating with one another.
We, as students, are both bloggers and creators. We are each other’s audience, so that distinctions between the two disappear. We comment on each other’s blogs just as creators and audiences congregate ad hoc in meandering conversations, in a common space of shared imagination and interests.
I would like to conclude by stating the fact that in democratic societies, everybody does have the right to hold opinions, and that the urge to connect and converse with others is so basic that it might as well be added to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Sabeer Bhatia, the creator of Hotmail, adds, “Just as everbody has an email account today, everybody will have a blog in five years. This means, Mr Bhatia adds, that, “Journalism won’t be a sermon any more, it will be a conversation.”
---Rati Sud
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