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Online Blog Users: What's With the Growing Trend?

Posted on: Saturday, 17 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

By Rick Bush
The Owens Outlook ( Owens Community College )

(U-WIRE) TOLEDO, Ohio -- Blogs are becoming as big a part of college life as trying to find a parking spot by the bookstore on the first day of classes, but usually with much less agitation. Technorati.com reported that they are tracking more than 16.7 million blog sites-and those are only the ones that have volunteered to be tracked by the site. In a recent report, the blog-finder site, which aims to connect bloggers, estimated that the number of blogs is doubling approximately every 5 months. In the posting "Weblogs: A History and Perspective," author Rebecca Blood gives a linear history of the blog, citing that at the beginning, weblogs were simply expressive websites for websurfers who wanted to react to stories they were discovering in their free time. Blogs are helping people to understand each other, but more importantly to help their own journey in self-discovery, according to Blood "The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions," said Blood. The makeup of the blog community ranges from professionals offering technical advice, such as Blood, to high school and college students seeking to keep in touch with friends or find new ones. "I started [blogging] because I was annoyed by having to answer the same questions every time I ran into someone who I hadn't seen in a while," said Ohio State University student Colleen Gallagher. "The benefits are that everyone knows what's going on as soon as you want to let them know," said Gallagher. "If you're having a rough time, people know even if you don't get a chance to talk to them very often and they can make time to give you a call." Gallagher said that even though it makes communication a lot easier, there are drawbacks. "The one people don't think about is that you don't know who is reading your blog. You can get yourself or other people in a lot of trouble by including details that they don't want other people to know." Owens student Dusty Bastian agrees. "I always write what I think and try to avoid filtering it, just to get it out of my head," she said. "Sometimes that is not a good thing to do; I forget that millions of people could be reading my thoughts."

(C) 2005 The Owens Outlook via U-WIRE

Source: U-WIRE

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