I remember when I first noticed blogging online; I thought is was just for people who liked to talk about themselves thus naturally leading to writing about themselves, and I once even thought it was a sophisticated chat room. Never would I have ever considered the fact that intelligent topics, worth reading, could be written about and that true learning could occur through this phenomena.
Hello world! Apparently all of my judgements were wrong. Now mainstream media websites have sections for blogging and some journalists have made it a point to blog about issues in a more opinionated fashion that would never print in other publications unless under an opinions column. This is all a part of the alternative journalism movement that is underway and once it goes mainstream it will be here to stay (but that's a whole other topic for another blog).
Even more mind-blowing is the concept of blogger's soon having a guild of some sort. I read about this in the Jan/Feb issue of the Columbia Journalism Review in an article by Chris Mooney called Blogonomics. It's true, how will we separate the self-obsessed or morons from "journalists" that have something important to teach the world? We need to have a standard. There should also be compensation for the effort in legitimate research and the intellectual property that blogs create.
It will be interesting to see where this is all headed but until the future reveals itself to us I will be writing... I mean blogging.
