There are so many options for choosing a site to for your blog. I had trouble choosing between the different sites. All of the blogging sites offer so many ways to customize your page and choose themes that fit you as an individual. I liked LiveJournal's homepage because it displayed popular posts, polls and pictures that make it easy to explore other blogs. Wordpress offers downloadable software to create your own blog. I didn't want to have to download software for my blog so I decided to choose between LiveJournal and Blogger. I decided to create my blog on blogger because another one of my classes uses blogger for our class blog. I thought it would be easier to use one site to navigate more than one class, than to create another account on another website. I also found that blogger made it very easy to keep up and maintain multiple sites, which makes it easy to follow and post for both my classes.
Blogging has become a source for news and journalism from all different people, from journalists to soccer moms. With the explosion of blogs and the ease of creating them, blogging has become a larger part of journalism, but it is still far from respected as a reliable form of media.
Blogging allows for fast dissemination of news in a forum where people can easily respond. This also allows for less strict rules about correct information, and fact checking. Last year there was an uproar when a popular blog of a Syrian Lesbian, which had been used as a reliable source of information due to the media lockdown in Syria was discovered to be written by an male American grad student in Scotland.
The article "Syrian Lesbian Bloggers, Fake Geishas, and the Attractions of Identiy Tourism" by Lisa Nakamura discusses the confusion and anger of the public when the truth of the blogger's identity came out. The article discusses how the internet allows people to take on different identities to gain attention or try out different personalities. The example of the Syrian Lesbian blogger who turned out to be an American man, demonstrates how blogging's accessibility and anonymity makes it difficult to be seen as a reliable new source.
The technology of the internet and blogging can be an amazing tool to quickly disseminate information and make it available to so many people. The public has to recognize the differences between blogging and traditional journalism. Blogging can be a reliable source of news, but it has to be checked and made sure that it is coming from a reliable source. I think blogging is an amazing tool to spread information, but it still has a long way to go, and people should still be skeptical and take news from less known sources with a grain of salt.
