PUTTING YOUR LIFE ONLINE
Gone are the days of sneaking into your older sister�s room to read her diary to find out if anything juicy had happened with Shane.
These days, just jump on the net and go searching for blogs.
Personal accounts of people�s interesting, quirky, weird (and often similarly boring) lives, opinions and thoughts are on display and being updated faster than you care to imagine. Welcome to the world of blogs.
Originally titled weblogs, in a day of obsessive abbreviation (further spurred on by our SMS habits) someone ditched a few letters, and we all settled down to read our favourite blogs. As a �web log� they track and comment on internet content, as well as providing diary-style accounts. The earliest blogs sought an audience on the net as early as 1997 and, after slow initial growth, they soon began breeding like rabbits and now the internet is awash with people�s dirty laundry.
Blogs are formats for people to discuss a broad range of topics, post links to related articles on the net, and invite people to comment on their site content. Some blogs often act as human-filters for the net, pointing you to interesting or overlooked sites and saving your hours of browsing. The addition of commentary by the editor - who is free to judge and question corporate media - enables readers to scan the original and annotated information with a critical mind. Once irate and sympathetic people start replying, you have a panel-like situation of people interacting with the media, a far cry from the passive viewers we are with the traditional television, paper and radio formats of media.
�[Blogs are] the one place in our lives that we (as people lucky enough to have access) can say whatever we want about anything we want. This was anti-television. Digital democracy,� says blogger Derek M. Powazek in �We�ve Got Blog� (Perseus Publishing 2002).
Self-publishing at its best, and worst.
�It is a democratising idea, that you and everyone else can write whatever you like (defamation laws notwithstanding), get your thoughts and experiences out into the open and post it online for all the world to see,� says blog reader & creator Graham Freeman (http://grudnuk.com/vm/) who tracks around 100 sites, reading about 20 at least once a day.
�I doubt that weblogs by themselves will shake the foundations of modern civilisation, at some point you have to start get more active if you want to do so. Though in that regard they're good for generating a groundswell for such. As a sounding board - a place to vent and to express and get ideas - weblogs are bloody good at that.�
For the curious at heart, it�s easy to be overwhelmed by the thousands of blogs that congest the information highway, so one of many good places to start is http://www.anthonyjhicks.com/aussieblogs. This Australian blog web-ring lists hundreds of Australian blogs and has an automatic tracker that lists sites as those updated in the last 12 and 24 hours. Because once you add blogging to your lists of acceptable addictions (next to coffee), you�ll want updates, regularly. Well at least till you become addicted enough that starting your own blog seems like a good idea�
If you�d like to submit your own blog to noise, click here.
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