Way back in 2000 my friend Sean started telling me about ‘blogs’ which stands for ‘web-log’. on Jan 1st 2003, I moved to Bali, to start Baliblog. When Sean and went walking around Kuta, telling people about Baliblog, they thought we said ‘Bali belog’, which mean ‘Bali stupid’ in Basa Bali. The westerners we talked to mostly had no idea of what a blog was either, and I remember us saying ‘don’t worry, in a couple more years everybody will know what a blog is.’
Seems like that time has arrived and blogs are used not just as person online diaries, but as business tools, as vehicles for major news companies. We have sports stars with blogs, tech gurus with blogs and military personel with blogs. Imagine being a soldier in Iraq, going out on patrol everyday, shooting at people, then coming back to blog about it. That is what I call original content!
With so much info being put up on the web, and all kinds of super social networks around, it becomes rather like an avalanche of info, and there’s no way to keep a track of all the stuff out there.
It occured to me recently that one segment of the community that might benefit from writing a blog is elderly people. As we get older, we have less people who we relate to. People in their 60’s and 70’s often store up a week’s worth of thoughts, then unload them on a willing listerner. I’m sure weve all met the old guy, who announces that he is always friendly to people, then launches into, ‘when I left school at age 15…., then at age 35 I became a fireman,…after retiring I started to build model aeroplanes….etc.’ Giving these people a blog, would be the ideal solution. There are a lot of people around who just want to babble, and blogging is online babbling.
The thing that makes blogs stand out from traditional media, when you boil it down, is they have more freedom to tell the truth. Anytime a media outlet, is connected with a political/ religious cause, business, major media company etc. it somehow stifles how much ‘truth’ can be told. When BBC wants to say ‘Bush is a moron’, they leave it to one of their bloggers. Still they cannot totally cut loose with their thoughts, for fear of getting sued / upsetting the investors / government.
So to wrap up, I’d say that blogs have arrived, there is an overload of them, and the ones that offer the best ideas are probably the ones that are somewhat organized, but still retain a degree of independence.
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