Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Blogging - New Age Journalism

Though started in 1994, blogs became popular in the new millenium .i.e in the 2000s atleast in India. Now bloggers are enjoying the status being the new age journalists. According to blogherald.com, there were 70 million blogs in July 2006 with Indian blogs being approximately 100,000. And this number continues to grow.

From being personal diaries to professional write-ups, blogs have come a long way. Google has seperate search page dedicated for blog search http://blogsearch.google.com/. You have blogs of almost every type - diaries, professional articles, sports, technical articles and reviews, film reviews, product reviews.

Unlike traditional journalism, here you have no restrictions in publishing your views (unless you are posting on some news paper's or news channel's site) giving you more liberty and power. But as they say, with great power comes great responsibilities. So you are your own judge when publishing your posts on the net.

Fed up with the reading of film reviews with all their jargon by critics in news papers every weekend then you have now one new avenue to ponder upon. Film reviews in blogs. One of my friends Sandeep has a blog mostly dedicated to film reviews. I did write a film review on Lage Raho Munna Bhai few weeks back. And there are bloggers whose blogs are dedicated only to film reviews. Cricket is one obsession with us Indians. So there are blogs dedicated only to cricket articles. Some of my earlier articles on cricket include Historic Win of India in West Indies, Cricket in the time of Football, Talking Cricket. Not only text, but also you will find pictures and videos embedded in the blog. Some of the blogs are dedicated only to picture/photos or videos.

Technical reviews are a biggest plus came out of blogging. Amit Agarwal's blog is sure a techie's delight as he carries you through the exciting world of Technology with his tips and reviews on latest technology and products.

Compared to traditional journalism I think, here you will find less dedicated readers. And you have to retain your regular readers and if you are a blogger and not updating the blog regularly then you are likely to lose your dedicated readers.

Big names in the media like NDTV, CNN-IBN are providing the netizens with the chance of posting their write-ups on their websites by providing the blog service, shows the importance of blogs in this era. Recently CNN-IBN's Citizen Journalist initiative was well appreciated and it made the channel/ibnlive.com site popular among net users.

Though live news (as in news paper, news channel web sites) is still not in the domain of the bloggers it is catching up slowly. And that by itself does not constitute journalism. Other areas like public opinion, reviews, articles, debates(as it happens through the exchange of comments between the author and readers of the blog) have been strong hold of the bloggers. Blogging community continues to grow and it will shape the things in the future is no understatement.

Comments are welcome

Raveesh

Post to read: Came across a post in Saurabh Saksena's blog titled 'In search of Indianness abroad'. Worth reading.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks for the mention Raveesh. Glad that you enjoy my blog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good post. You do lot of R & D before posting...that's great.

    In my opinion blogs are not exploited at their full potential because of following reasons:

    1. Reading is not a hobby/habbit for many individuals, hence they never spend time visiting blogs

    2. The information on internet being tooo much, your blog, unless it has something unique, ends up as just another set of characters alongwith trillions of webpages.

    3. If you have a small set of readers, and you want guaranteed delivery of your message, emailing would be better option than posting on blog and hoping that someone will come and read it.

    What do you thing on these?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Another observation I have made is most of the writers are readers by default, so most blogs are predominantly read by other bloggers...

    ReplyDelete
  4. blogging gives opportunity for every person to post his/her experiences and opinions. it won't be biased as in newspapers and tv channels.

    btw my blog not completely dedicated to movie reviews. check my lastest post its about my recent trek.

    for me blogs are effective way communicating with my distant friends. I need not have to discuss abt movies, cricket and treks individually.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi nidhi,

    I agree with you. Reading on the net is not as you read the books. Emailing is a better option but what I believe is that if they like your blog based on your previous posts they will surely come as regular visitors.

    Hi Shande,

    May be blogs were invented as another tool for communicating to distant friends but their definition is changing day by day and blogs are becoming effective way of mass communication.

    ReplyDelete

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails