If you're anywhere close to the internet, you can't help buthearing about blogs. It might be the second coming of the Guttenberg printingpress, but I don't think it quite is. And let's talk about why it's important.First of all, blog-which comes from web log; I have blog written up here, but Ireally mean blogs, because there are probably 8 to 10 million blogs inexistence.
Now where do they live? Well, they obviously live on theinternet, but there's something called the blogsphere. Now I can't draw in 10million little blogs, but the interesting thing about blogs is that there'slots of interconnection, interlinking, so that you end up with something that'sjust completely filled in as a social network of content and expression.
And I think the important thing about blogs is first of all,it's about opinion, it's about personality, it's about expressing yourself in away that well, we used to do in the old days of the internet, but we call thempersonal web pages. And the problem with those personal web pages is that well,you needed to know html and you needed to know some scripting if you reallywanted to have a cool web page. And, you ended up putting lots of kinds ofinformation on it, whereas a blog is really more like a diary, where you have apage here and here's today, and here's the things that I'm talking about andhere are links out into the blogsphere and here's what I'm writing abouttomorrow and here's a nice picture to do it. In fact, there are even photoblogs. So that blogs are becoming the new container for people to expressthemselves in a very straightforward, simple way.
Another point about blogs is this notion of transparency,which is the opposite-I'm not going to spell it out but, because I can't spellvery well-but it's the opposite of opaque. In other words, you can see throughit. Now what can you see through? Well, because it's a medium in which peopleare expressing themselves and because it's connected to lots of differentthings, there's almost like a self-regulating mechanism that someone's going tocall someone out if they don't think that they're telling the truth.
And that's why it's having an impact on journalism, in thatthere are a lot of real journalists out there blogging, including us at CNETand ZDNet. And the impact is that it provides you with a form to quickly getout something and connect it to other things as a supplement and complement totraditional journalism.
