Citizen Journalism: Blogs Open the Door

The Internet first granted wide access to the ordinary readers through newsgroups and later personal Web pages. Newsgroups are a primarily text segment of the Internet also known as the Usenet. They are organized as bulletin boards, with the latest post at the top, and require little expertise beyond that of e-mail. The ability to chat with people of similar minds around the world made newsgroups especially popular in the 1990s with disenfranchised segments such as gays and political radicals.

The great challenge of blogging is writing day after day. Many people want to write, few want to work like journalists.

The development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee allowed a relatively easy combination of text and graphics. When WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) webpage editors were popularized in the late 1990s, users no longer needed to learn HTML code to produce a Web page and personal pages began to flourish. The Web authoring software was often expensive, however, and still took enough skill to daunt the non-technical. Additionally, Web pages required access to an Internet hosting site or server.

Meanwhile computer programmers were organizing their work via a small diary program called a weblog. Soon shortened to “blog,” the online diary allowed teams of programmers to post the progress of their work on the unit’s network. The log was easily accessible to anyone on the team and displayed the latest announcement at top of the screen page.

Like many Internet developments, the functional weblog workhorse soon became a recreational Web fixture. When entrepreneurial companies offered free software and hosting in 1999, the technical world took notice. Wired reported that the upstart Pyra company had an amazing 3,000 subscribers on its year-old Google platform in February 2000.

Today, Technorati tracks more than 70 million blogs. Technorati CEO David Silfry estimated 120,000 new blogs are created each day - 1.7 per second.
Blogs are extremely easy to set up, cost nothing to maintain and simple to access. The impact of the blogging tidal wave is immeasurable and will be discussed later, but one of its shortcomings spawned the variation of traditional media popularly known as citizen journalism. The great challenge of blogging is writing day after day. Many people want to write, few want to work like journalists. It is much easier to make an occasional contribution to a Web site operated by someone else than to face a daily publication deadline.

Enter citizen journalism.

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