Through the Blogosphere.

  • Pack T
ISSN: 87556286
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Abstract

This article deals with the proliferation of Weblogs in the U.S. as of 2004. According to a blogging history on Yahoo!, some people consider Mosaic's 1993 What's New page to be the first blog. In 1997, the term Weblog was coined by Jorn Barger with his Robot Wisdom Weblog. Only a handful of blogs existed in 1998. In 1999, the number began to grow dramatically after the proliferation of free Weblog-creation programs such as Blogger. These programs made it easy for anyone to create a blog, a process that has been called push-button publishing. By October 2000, bloggers were creating 300 new blogs a day. Whether or not bloggers are luring people away from words on paper is debatable, but there is strong evidence that bloggers are, in other ways, having a genuine impact on the world. Blogs brought former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's endorsement of Strom Thurmond's 1948 pro-segregation platform to the attention of the traditional media. Blogs raised the first questions concerning documents about President George W. Bush's Air National Guard service aired by CBS News and sparked the media firestorm that led to the network's admission that the documents were, in fact, questionable. Bloggers are not threatening traditional media, nor replacing it--bloggers are enhancing it, adding additional voices, another check and balance. And bloggers are having an impact in many fields besides journalism and politics. Teachers are using blogs to educate. Scientists use them to share information and ideas. Photographers use them to offer their views and get people to see the world around them in new ways. Group blogs allow large numbers of people worldwide to create the feel of a community gathering. A skilled blogger can guide us to or through the information we need, whether we knew we needed it or not. But now, with so many skilled and unskilled bloggers, we are creating a vast, unknowable blogosphere that cannot be mastered.

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APA

Pack, T. (2004). Through the Blogosphere. Information Today, 21(10), 41–44. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=15038798&site=ehost-live DP  - EBSCOhost DB  - bth

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