The impact of blogging for me..
The term "blog" was coined in 1998 as a derivation of "weblog", but online journals have been around since the early days of the web. In fact, blogging isn’t as much of a technological innovation as it is a social phenomenon. The internet created a platform to enable free flowing communication and information exchange, but it wasn’t until blogging hit the mainstream that the web became a medium to capture society’s stream of consciousness. People of all backgrounds, interests, and biases now contribute to the global discourse on human affairs.
Blogs have become a big business with a couple of recent blog networks being acquired by large companies. American online purchased Web blogs, Inc.,in October 2005 for an estimated $25 million. Weblogs, Inc. is a network of over 85 blogs covering a variety of topic areas. Now, new blog networks are popping up and it will be interesting to see if the traditional media outlets acquire the popular blog networks much as they did popular content sites in the late 1990s.
This is incredible to me. The fact that we have the ability to put information out there about ourselves in such a manner that we can foster trust, reputation, even friendship before even meeting someone is just awesome. What boggles my mind is that more corporations don’t recognize this. What is it that is really happening when someone reads through a blog about someone? It humanizes them. It allows a reliable expectation to be created for the reader about how to deal with the writer. Most of all, it creates a sense of knowing someone - almost a kinship kind of feeling.
