| Many people, particularly those under 20 years old, use sites like LiveJournal, Xanga, Myspace or other blogging services to publish a frequently updated personal diary of their thoughts and activities. Justin Hall was the prototypical radically candid diary blogger. |
| A number of social networking websites offer blogging services to their users, through which other members can monitor the recent posts of their friends or contacts. LiveJournal.com is best known as an online journal site, but one which emphasizes the social aspect of maintaining a "friends" list of other journals to read. MySpace.com, Tribe.net and other sites also allow users to add a blog to their profile. |
| Individuals with strong political opinions were among the first famous bloggers, and much of the political influence of the blogosphere was enabled by the large numbers of other bloggers, researchers, and citizens willing to call their Congressional representatives that political bloggers could mobilize. No official portfolio, credential, wealth, political power, or even any claim to special knowledge is required to blog what you think of political events. This democratization of the "chattering class" that used to be reserved for newspaper columnists or radio-tv talk show hosts, is both the benefit and the pitfall of what has come to be known as the blogosphere. |
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| Entrepreneurs, small businesses, and large corporations are adopting internal and external blogs as bottom-up knowledge-sharing media, enterprise-wide early warning systems, enabling environments for communities of practice, and marketing channels. A few years ago, only the most radical enthusiasts blogged inside corporations or blogged to the world from the inside; now, the larger population of early adopters, from Microsoft and IBM to Procter & Gamble to mom-and-pop shops are starting to blog and share best pracdtices. |
| Blogging has probably garnered the most attention in the realm of journalism, raising questions about the role of blogging versus traditional news media. Whether bloggers are grassroots citizen journalists or opinionated amateurs, blogging is unquestionably influencing and altering the field of journalism, online and off. |
| Today, the educators who teach their students to blog, wiki, and podcast are the enthusiasts, the early adopters. Over the next decade, these tools ought to become part of the college curriculum, as essential to 21st century citizenship and scholarship as the library, blackboard and the PC were. Just as rhetoric is about the persuasive skills required of free citizens of democratic societies (the "liberal arts" taught in ancient Athens were those considered essential for free citizens of the first democracy), and written composition is about argument and representation of knowledge as well as grammar and syntax, the participatory characteristics of blogging will be the source of its greatest educational value. Blogging is ideal for those who believe in the pedagogical theory of constructivism -- that people learn more quickly and thoroughly when they actively work to construct their meaning, rather than passively recording facts that are broadcast to them. |
| Groups of scientists, employees, students, journalists, political organizers use group blogs to create a collective resource as a public good or an internal community-building medium. |
| Despite some skepticism in the scientific research community, blogs hold the potential to increase communication between scientists, augmenting peer-reviewed literature and allowing institutions to respond more quickly to new issues and advancements in the field. Still, more scientists must begin exploring the role blogs can play in an academic context before they can have a broader impact. |
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| The public sphere is where citizens discuss, inform, persuade, and conduct the communications necessary for self-governance. If the widespread literacies that were enabled by the printing press in the 16th and 17th centuries created the context for the imagined communities of constitutional democracies in the 18th century, what literacies and what context will be required if democracy is to thrive in a twenty first century regime of participatory media? Could blogging with a public voice, if conducted both critically and civilly, be one such civic literacy? |
| From online town hall meetings to municipal, state, and federal agencies, citizens and government officials are using blogs and other tools to open and lubricate the business of governance and government |
| "datablogging is the notion that traditional blog entries have extended data fields appended to them to track various things." |
| As microprocessors, sensors, RFID tags, webcams, and other information-gathering artifacts grow small enough and inexpensive enough embed them in inanimate objects, some of those objects will regularly "publish" information about whether the coffee is ready (the first webcam was aimed at a coffee pot in a research laboratory), the weather has changed, etc. In most cases, this stream of reports will be broadcast as a raw RSS feed; in some cases, objects will merit their own blogs. |
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Page Last Updated: Oct 25 10:54am by Howard Rheingold