If you're anywhere close to the Internet, you can't help buthear about blogs. It might be the second coming of the Gutenberg Printing Press,but I don't think it quite is. But let's talk about why it's important.
First of all, blog, which comes from web log. I have"bog" written up here, but I really mean blogs because there areprobably 8 to 10 million blogs in existence. Now, where do they live? Well,they obviously live on the Internet, but there's something called theblogosphere. Now, I can't draw in 10 million little blogs, but the interestingthing about blogs is that there's lots of interconnection, interlinking so thatyou end up with something that's just completely filled in as a kind of socialnetwork 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, What we callthem personal 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 youreally want 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 links out into the blogosphere and here's where I'm writing about tomorrowand here's a nice picture to do it. In fact, there are even photo blogs so thatblogs are becoming the new container for people to express themselves in a verystraightforward, simple way.
Another point of our blogs is this notion of transparency,which is the opposite. I'm not going to spell it out because I can't spell verywell, but it's the opposite of opaque. In other words, you can see through it.Now, what can you see through? Well, because it's a medium in which people areexpressing themselves and because it's connected to lots of different things.It's almost like a self-regulating mechanism that someone is going to callsomeone out if they don't think that they are telling the truth and that's whyit's having an impact on journalism and that there are a lot of realjournalists out there blogging, including us at CNET and ZDNet. And the impactis that it provides you with a form to quickly get out something and connect itto other things as a supplement and complement to traditional journalism.
