ALJ301

Global Voices is a great network of bloggers. It offers helpful and immediate search selections down the left hand side that enable the user to pick a topic or region to read about.

It’s so well organised it offers most blog entries in at least one other language other than English. Most offer more.

Global Voices says it is run by an ‘international team of volunteer authors, regional blogger-editors and translators are your guides to the global blogosphere.’ (From http://globalvoicesonline.org/about/)

Stephen Quinn recently stated in an interview conducted for another subject (ALJ319) that he believed blogs will eventually die out because they are mainly written voluntarily.

Global Voices is a good example of this. Each piece written is by a volunteer and all the behind-the-scenes work is voluntary.

Yet blogs are a great form of communication, news and general information. For example, rather than calling about a mobile phone issue, most people in the 18-25 age group would probably jump on for the answer. Forums and reviews immediately pop up in a search, and with the advanced search option it makes it even easier.

Global Voices and Orble are great blogging and information sites. Orble even pays up to $100 per blog entry. But is personal satisfaction a big enough motivator to keep people blogging?

The Internet has the amazing ability to lead a reader off-track. There is so much interesting information out there, and new types of media, that it is easy to get side tracked.

Journalism.co.uk has an amazing array of articles about journalism and how-to options for Internet users. The articles are also well researched with a lot of quotes and examples thrown in… hence the ability to get side tracked.

As an example, in this article at http://www.journalism.co.uk/5/articles/532452.php written by Laura Oliver, she made a reference in a link saying ‘such as Fred’. There was no explanation as to who Fred was… and following the link led to a highly amusing vlog. (http://uk.youtube.com/fred) Fred is a good example of a random blogger who has caught the public’s interest.

Links are turning into the new references. Bloggers don’t need to explain their sentences – they can just pop in a link and the user can check it for themselves.

This article at http://www.journalism.co.uk/2/articles/532530.php by Judith Townend quoted Caroline Little. Townend also made use of multimedia and put the whole speech in for people to listen to.

Multimedia also allows people to add credibility to their articles. A lot of information on the Internet is questionable and needs to be verified. But a lot of information is also true – and links and multimedia allow people to add easy credibility to their articles.

BuzzMachine offers an interesting perspective into journalism as it develops on the web.

In an article Jeff Jarvis published on 30 September 2008, he states, ‘I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic… I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed… We have to use the new tools we have at hand to create new structures for covering news and informing each other.’

Blogs seem to be at the center of a new journalistic phenomenon. Jarvis has said in a lot of his articles recently that people need to embrace the future. For example, he mentions using wikis in journalism. With the rising popularity of citizen journalism, this could encourage more people to get involved in and read the news.

A passer-by who sees a car crash could suddenly become a contributing reporter on a wiki page or blog. Forums and blogs already use this kind of discussion tactic in reviews or reports.

For example, a review posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX5eh7eLaVQ on the Nokia N95 produced 304 comments – a lot that were useful in how to use the N95, with some comparisons between the N95 and Iphone.

There are dodgy people out there, but a lot of the best information comes from direct sources or users of a product. Perhaps the best news updates come from bystanders.