Week 13: 10 years since blogs took off

Posted on October 14th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I read an article over the weekend about how the evolution of blogs can be traced back to December 17, 1997 when John Barger first came up with the name “weblog” to describe his online list of favourite websites. In 1999, by which time weblog had become blog, there were only about a 100 known bloggers producing their own sites. Now there are more than 94 million blogs, with hundreds of new blogs, vlogs, phlogs and moblogs popping up every few minutes.

It is fascinating to look back over a relatively short time and see just how much has changed, and how quickly, as people around the world adopt the web more fully into their lives. This really raises big questions about how much more change the next 10 years alone will see, and also how much further uptake of current and future technologies and forms of communication there will be.

The universal adoption of blogs also shows how people are now aware that there is a forum in which they can communicate with the world, without any of the barriers they face with traditional media forms. Many bloggers have gone on the write books or been asked to write columns for papers and magazines, so the little old (10 years now!) blog has grown up to become the launch pad of much bigger things, as well as a revolutionary communication medium (see week 11, Blogging from Burma, for more on this).

The sad thing is that Barger, who introduced a medium that has become immensely popular and well-used around the world, and is also a vital component for our assessment in this subject, is now homeless and penniless.

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Week 12: Inside the newspaper

Posted on October 8th, 2007 by kmburb.
Categories: Uncategorized.

This week I have been doing work experience at the Herald & Weekly Times. I spent a day with the photographers and it was interesting to learn a bit more about how technology has changed their job.

They all use digital cameras now, so the old darkrooms have been removed. When they are out on a few jobs and don’t have time to back to the office, they load the photos onto their laptop and email them back. This means images can instantly be loaded onto the website. Their news website is still not making them money, but they are trying to figure out ways that it can.

In the newsroom itself, they are constantly on the net searching for updates to breaking stories and look at other sites for new stories. I also saw some journalists search a Myspace website for pictures and information about a girl who is rumoured to be the girlfriend of a sports star.

All the journalists are meant to be getting blackberries next year, so they can instantly email stories back to the office and to the website if they are out on the road.
When there was a train accident they also used pictures from witnesses who had taken photos on their mobile phones.

So there are aspects of the “changing newsroom” that we have looked at over this semester, but in many ways it seems that they are still catching up and are still developing their online content. Actually the fact that they are only just now building a dedicated office area for the online department shows that it is still something they are adapting to and integrating into their media system.

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