Guide ToThis Site's Contents

Welcome to Participatory Media Literacy (Home)
Blogging
Wiki
RSS
Social Bookmarking, Tagging, Music/Photo/Video Sharing
Podcasting
Video Blogging
Digital Storytelling
Mashups
Chat: Channeling the Backchannel
Transliteracy
Forecasting: Thinking long term, developing foresight

Participatory Media Education Resources

Blogging

A blog is a web page that is updated frequently, with the latest entry at the top of the page. Given that simple definition, a wild variety of diaries, news sources, reference repositories, collaboratories, filters, compendiums, lab journals, classroom discussions, critical essays, rants, polemics, jokes, guides, advertising pitches, social and political movements has resulted, with over thirty million blogs tracked worldwide by Technorati. With a long tradition of individual authorship in the history of the Internet, stretching back at least to the beginnings of Usenet in 1980, user-created web pages is what the web is all about.

 In 1994, Swarthmore student Justin Hall began publishing a compendium of links to other websites and a scandalously candid running account of his life. In 1997, Jorn Barger coined the term "Weblog" to describe his frequently updated list of links, "Robot Wisdom." Dave Winer's Scripting News, another proto-blog, started in 1997, and his first blog, hosted by HotWired, started in 1996. In 1999, Peter Merholz proposed pronouncing it "We blog." Later in 1999, Evan Williams' and Meg Hourihan's company, Pyra Labs, launched the product "Blogger" that made it easy to start and maintain a blog; Blogger was acquired by Google in 2003. The term "blogosphere" to describe the interlinked web of blog was invented as a joke in September 1999, according to Wikipedia.

 The political power of the blogosphere grew visible in 2003 when a small army of volunteer investigator-bloggers kept alive the story of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's racist remarks and unearthed similar incidents in the past, eventually costing him his political position ("the internet's first scalp"). In September, 2004, CBS newscaster Dan Rather claimed to have documents that showed Presidential candidate George W. Bush to have evaded the draft and whitewashed his absences from National Guard duty. Again, an army of amateur fact-checkers organized online and turned up evidence that the documents cited by Rather were forgeries.