The Blogging Phenomenon - Intro

The creation of millions of personal weblogs heralded the arrival of a new medium of communication. Before, there was only print, tv, and radio. Now, there is the personal weblog.

Blogs handle information differently. Unlike newspapers which have to be politically correct, blogs don't have to be. Blogs are highly personalised, very opinionated accounts of life according to one person. It is perhaps better likened to a person with a loudspeaker rather than a group of inspired scribes working on the Bible.

While there has been much talk about the promise of the equalising force blogging offers, the fact remains that only those with loudspeakers, only those who are technologically saavy and have access to the internet, may respond. It is a limited medium, which would explain why on an average surf on blogger.com, half of my hits are blogs with authors under the age of 20.

Nevertheless, blogging creates a virtual community (perhaps limited, but still with the potential of spanning across continents). Bloggers comment on each other's blogs, and create new content and coversations. It is this ability to comment and link to other sites that transforms weblogging from being an introspective personal diary to something else altogether. This site recognises the significance of links - more links equals more readers equals more significance in bloggosphere. If you do a search on "mis_nomer" on technorati, you'll find that this site has 9 links from 8 sources. (Most of the links are my own blogs linking to each other, but what the heck.)

So I am going to do with blogging duty here and write about a few of the blogs of note I've stumbled upon recently. These will appear in the following posts.