Web-logs or blogs as they are known are sweeping the journalism industry into new more personal realms.
Evan Williams is the founder of Blogger.com, which is credited with starting this revolution of small journalism.
Arnold King, writer for Corante Tech News believes that blogging is a useful filter for the unimportant news everyday. Of course, now with all news channels running the same highlights 24 hours a day it’s a nice thing to have many news filters.
Lately in a Historical Methods class taught here at ETSU the question has come up whether paper will be a factor in historical research in the future. This question is extremely relevant where future historians are concerned. Those brave souls who are history majors are bombarded with searching through journals and browsing under massive amounts of paper.
One idea was that instead of searching through paper journals in the future it would be quite possible we could be digging into a person’s hard drive to record their lives.
Blogging is a kind of real-time or reality show of your life through digital media.
Blogs serve news and political purposes instead of worrying about who keeping tabs on someone else’s life. The blogs of the Internet politicos have served the more psuedo-intellectual types.
This is a creative way to get folks thinking and to serve what some political scientists call the “opinion leader” or the person that thinks for others.
The most famous blogger is Matt Drudge who operates DrudgeReport.com. Drudge gained his fame by breaking news in the Clinton scandal with Monica Lewinsky. The blogger like Drudge not only breaks news but provides the reader with his sources.
This is also true of other sites like Instapundit.com where the reader is given opinion or news with the sources listed right there. The hassle of documenting is exactly that, not a hassle. The news story is already linked up to the original source.
The web-log serves as another tool in the realism of now. The onlooker receives the information now, forms an opinion later.
As Arnold King would feel, filtering would allow the the most thought-provoking news to be presented and then opinion created to go along beside it.
The web site of Andrew Sullivan, a political and cultural critic, at AndrewSullivan.com does just that in developing news alongside opinion. He combines his British Tory beliefs with thoughtful critiques of American news.
Blogging proves that different points-of-view can exist with each other while coming to the same conclusion. Sullivan is the best example; his view is that of a homosexual, Catholic, Tory working in Britain.
Currently the blogs are serving both sides of the war protest issue. Students from across the world are issuing their political beliefs in this medium.
One of the best collegiate blog web sites is OxBlog at Oxford University in Britain. At that particular site they have been tracing the backers of the anti-war protesters.
The New Republic is neo-liberal web site with some insightful data on the other side of the aisle.
Log on to some of these online diaries and thoughtfully review news processed daily. Develop a blog because now is the day of instant punditry.

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