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At the age of 38, I decided to step out of the rat
race of New York, join the Peace Corps and board a plane for Manila.
This blog is dedicated to my adventures in the Philippines for the
next two years. Wish me luck.” This is how Julia Campbell, an
American Peace Corps volunteer whose dead body was found several
days ago by rescuers in a remote village in Mountain Province,
described herself when she started her blog in December 2004.
During the past couple of years,
the growth of blogs in cyberspace has been remarkable and
phenomenal.
Leading blog tracker, Technorati,
reported that as of March 2007 there are more than 70 million blogs
in the blogosphere, a term originally coined jokingly, they say, by
American blogger Brad L. Graham in 1999, which has reference to the
community of bloggers. Technorati reported that there are at least
1.5 million blog posts each day and approximately 1.4 new blogs are
created every second.
For those not in the know, a blog,
an abbreviated version of the term “web log,” is an
Internet-generated journal where the user may write, edit and post
entries, usually displayed in reverse chronological order, about
practically anything from facts to fiction, from news to mere
announcements, from commentaries or opinions to personal experiences
and share them to the on-line community to view, read, link, or
comment on. The term “web log” was coined by American blogger,
Jorn Barger in 1997 while the short form “blog” was the idea of
a certain Peter Merholz.
Blogs are actually the digital
evolution of traditional journals and diaries, where people keep a
running account of their personal lives. With the facility and
convenience of the Internet to capture different media formats,
several types of blogs were also born, like “photoblogs” for
photographs, “vlog” for videos, “podcasting” for audios,
“moblog” for those generated by mobile devices, “splogs” for
that pernicious spam blogs, “slogs” for a slice or section of a
regular business website, or a “blawgs” for legal blogs.
From being a mere social network
of personal and individual online journals and diaries more than a
decade ago, the blogosphere is increasingly
redefining mass media, human interaction and
global culture today.
Blogs have the capability of
shaping and even influencing public opinions and events. Blogs are
easy repository of desired information or even entertainment, in the
same vein that they could be the root cause of conflict and
antagonism. Some fortunate bloggers earn good money from their blogs
through on-line advertisements or by publishing a “blook,” the
term used for published books based on blogs.
It is not difficult to understand
why blogs are consistently and aggressively becoming a very popular
mode of human expression. There is no other form of public and mass
media nowadays that could compete with blogs in terms of
facilitating, propagating and pushing the exercise of freedom of
speech and expression beyond the limits of costs, regulations and
censorship.
Blogs are largely anarchic and
generally beyond the ambit of prior restraint and the usual
restrictions obtaining in mainstream mass media, although bloggers
are certainly not immune from criminal liability or certain legal
responsibilities by reason of their posts. Each blogger therefore
becomes responsible for his or her acts in cyberspace.
On February 22, 2007, a court in
Alexandria convicted an Egyptian blogger for insulting Islam and the
Egyptian president on his writings in the Internet.
Former flight attendant Ellen
Simonetti of North Carolina was fired by Delta Airlines for
inappropriate entries in her blog that documented her personal life
and experiences. In 2006, however, she successfully published a book
about her blog entitled: “Diary of a Dysfunctional Flight
Attendant: The Queen of Sky Blog.”
Early this month, Malaysian
Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin was quoted to have said that
bloggers should not be exempt from the same controls as the
mainstream media, and accused them of using lies to overthrow
government.
Blogging is about human freedom.
And it would be here to stay and further revolutionize human
expression.
(www.soriano-ph.com.)
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