The first blog post up here was about the illusive Scott Brodeur. As the semester progressed online journalism developed around us. The presidential election gave us a perfect expiriment to see how online journalists are participating in the electoral process and the effect they had on the overall coverage. The hoax about Sarah Palin and Africa was started in a blog and showed us the influence of pure online journalism, albiet if it was in the pejorative. Blogs have opened themselves up as a viable alternative to mainstream news outlets. If you look there is more to blogs than some guy wasting his bosses time at work, there are some professionals out there. I would argue that we change what we call “blogs” as the name is associated with innacuracy, opinion and overall internet junk. Online journalism is different from blogs and it should be distinguished. Being another person who has grabbed a corner of the internet for himself doesn’t make me feel part of any community. The net is so vast and full of junk that small posts seem irrelivant. What isn’t is the sum of all those voices. The sum of all the comments on a post board or the sum of all the blogs on an issue can provide us with a mean average of opinion that after being put through the numbers can give us an accurate assesment about how people feel on an issue. If we could figure out better ways of measuring this mess of online opinion and conjecture the internet blog world would serve a more definable purpose in serving the intellectual gestalt.
December 9, 2008...11:39 pm
retrospecticus
Jump to Comments
