Blogging Just Got A Little Louder...

In this class (particularly Camille Paglia's piece) we have discussed the contrast between traditional print newspaper and magazine writing and that of its digital counterpart on the Internet. No more is this more distinctive than in the blogosphere; spawning from a diary-like function this genre of writing has weaved itself into the most accredited of traditional print news media like the New York Times and CNN. News and media organizations have acknowledged this phenomenon as best they could and incorporated it into their business models and infrastructure.
But the blogosphere is a creation of the digital domain, and while to some extent it has been manipulated to function in the format of traditionally print-oriented editorials, the ever expanding choice and multitude of the blog on the web is not as such that it can be limited to a narrower class of "accredited" bloggers.
It is true that there perhaps exists some hierarchy of blog writing in the web; that for every 50 blogs about insignificant personal rants masqueraded in poor grammar and syntax we will find one heralded by a noticeable portion of the online masses. But to assume that these "few" Nobel like blogs entail those found on ESPN.com and USA Today is to be foolhardy. Undoubtedly the blog writers that have been brought in to usher this fusion of internet-print journalism must have been talented and popular so as to have been able to garner such attention from the high and mighty news media, but the law of averages coupled with the sheer abundance of blogs out there covering every possible interest and subject tells us that there are more out there than just the ones we read about in the technology section of USATODAY.com

Many of you guys are going to look at the adjoining article I link to this post and wonder what the coherent connection is. The point that I'm trying to make is that blogging...Internet writing and journalism as a whole, which has often been criticized by detractors as an inferior form is growing louder in its cry for equal artistic and journalistic consideration. This NY Times article which delves into professional sports' issues and concerns with "sports blogging" is a clear example of the reality and attention blogging has begun to command. The questions being asked about traditional press privileges for reporters as opposed to bloggers are noteworthy signals of the changes surfacing on the horizon of news, media, sports and journalism.

Please Read Up & Comment:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21bloggers.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=technology

Twitter Anyone?

Twitter hit the blogosphere with a bang two years ago when it first launched. Spreading like a viral YouTube video, soon every major blogger in the tech biz was Twittering. The simple service, which allows users to 'microblog' with up to 140 characters, changed the way people thought about blogs (and how to write them).

Today, people are finding new and different ways to use the social blog. One such example is using Twitter in a Academia to extend the relationships from class into an online world. Granted, we already have this blog, but it might be interesting to experiment with a more dynamic, real time system that others would still find accessible and worthwhile.

If anyone would be interested in playing around with Twitter, let me know. I have an account now (user name: TedBaker warning: may be some harsh language depending on my mood) but I'll admit to not using it much. Perhaps if I actually had a reason to and other people to interact with, I'd be forced to keep up on my Tweets.

(Semi-related note: HelloTxt allows users to update several status messages for sites like Facebook and Twitter from a central dialog box. Time saving if you participate in more than one social network.)