Level: Intermediate
Credits: www.speakup.com.br edition 260
What are blogs and bloggers?
Blog is a short for weblog: a diary written on the internet. Bloggers update blogs as often as they like, adding text, photos and even films. People across the globe can read the latest installment instantly, look through old posts, and leave comments.
How long have blogs been around?
Web diaries have existed since the internet began. Now programming advances and broadband networks allow anyone to upload data regularly into standardized templates.
How do I blog?
You need five minutes and an e-mail address to get started at: www.blogger.com
What can I blog about?
Blogs are ideal for showing ideas to the world or sharing with friends. Common types are:
Personal diaries, recording daily activities and thoughts, profound or mundane.
Networks: teams, clubs and families keep in touch and organize events.
Uniting people across the world through shared interests: business, coking, poetry, biscuits etc.
Personal projects: researching family, history, renovating a house, writing a book, moving abroad.
Commentators offer instant journalism from world events to the latest gadgets.
Political bloggers promote agendas; corporate blogs spread companies ideals.
News blogs offer established media and new outlets readers and listeners not only get news faster, but contribute ideas and criticisms.
What makes a blog popular?
Some blogs inform us about events others amuse with perspectives on familiar things.
Blogging came into the public eye with the Baghdad blogger’s reports from the Iraq war: blogging as political reportage. Incidents unseen by reporters were blogged during recent troubles in Burma and Pakistan. But freedom of speech may upset authorities: outspoken Saudi blogger Fouah al-Farhan was detained in December. Situations familiar to all are amusingly dramatized in Things my Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington, while A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down offers a warm look at that British obsession, biscuits, including the famous Garibaldi. Another hit posts the letters of World War I soldier, Harry Lamin, as if he were writing today (error he was writing). Thousands follow Harry’s struggles, never knowing when the next post is coming, of whether this will be his last.
Is this end of books?
No, some blogs even become books. Successful “blooks” were written by call girl “Belle De Jour” and nymphomaniac” “Girl with a One track Mind”. There is even an award, the Lulu Blooker Prize. Yet the Baghdad blogger felt his writing lost something when published conventionally: “In a blog, there’s always a conversation going on”.
Is blogging here to stay?
Yes: There are 120 million blogs, and two new blogs start every second. Critics point out that 200 million blogs have already been abandoned; many blogs are prejudiced, foolish or boring; with so much noise, how can we find relevant information? Supporters argue that clear news democratization of media and by 2021, “citizens will produce 50 percent of the news.”
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