Cup of coffee & your morning blog


For our parent's generation, the morning would often start out with a hot cup of coffee and a chance to ruffle through the pages of the newspaper. Personally whenever i smell real newsprint, i can’t help but crave a nice up of coffee in a thick handled mug. It sounds super Pavlovian, but sooner or later I may not crave coffee or information when I smell newsprint -- instead my caffeinne fit may be triggered by the smell of my laptop and a need for blogs.

You are either thinking to yourself at this point, “I have no idea what a blog is,” or you are a total blog fiend, have already experimented with creating a wikki and you update your blog via video from a PDA while you’re in class. If you are the former and not the nerdier latter, you are going to need some help catching up.

Let’s start out with definition according the newest version of the Oxford English Dictionary: blog • noun a weblog. • verb (blogs, blogging, blogged) [no obj.] [usu. as noun] (blogging) add new material to or regularly update a weblog. - DERIVATIVES blogger noun.

A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically—like a "what's new" page or journal. The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly. Many blogs are personal, ‘what's on my mind’ type musings. Others are collaborative efforts based on a specific topic or area of interest. Some blogs are just for fun. Some are for work. Some are both.

So say I am blogging, I am a blogger, one who blogs; what exactly is it that I regularly update my site with? ANYTHING! It’s the internet after all, and everything out there can be linked, dissed, loved and ranted about right on your own little piece of the blogosphere. Yes, the blogosphere.

At 12:45 AM on December 30, 2001 William Quick formally proposed the name ‘Blogosphere’ on Daily Pundit (a blog) as ‘ a name for the intellectual cyberspace we bloggers occupy.’ In the post he even sights the greek logos as the root word. This post, only a few years old now, sums up what blogs are becoming. Individuals are relating truth (or what they think truth is) to each other through links, comments and discussions about issues, thoughts and stuff on other blogs.

The craziest thing about blogs, is that anyone with internet access can blog. There are several completely free (I’m serious) services that will format and host your blog for you. The most popular of these blog services is, not suprisingly, a site called blogger.com Blogger is easy to use, easy to update and has a huge help section that can help even the most skittish Luddite learn how to hyperlink in hyperspeed.

Famous people blog.

Blogging allows for people who don’t have the influential and monetary stutus of Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner to have a media empire of their own. Suprisingly though, there a quite a few celebrity blogs out there. Dave Barry, the sindicated humor columnist, electronic music artist (cough), Moby and even William Shatner are all members of the blogcelebs. However there are also a number of people who have gained celebrity status strictly from their use of a blog.

Salam Pax is the name used by a blogger from Baghdad, who’s site dear_raed.blogspot.com was nearly overloaded during the invasion Iraq, namely because he was the only one inside the capitol city stilling updating. Anti-Sadam, yet not super pro-American, Salam offers a point of view unreachable before the advent of blogging. Anyone can read his first hand account of his parents home getting searched by American troops the day after it happend. He posts about how it affected them, and how their daily lifes have changed since the beginning of the occupation. It’s almost like having a friend you’ve never known, from somewhere you’ve never been -- and its changing the way that people communicate and the way that information spreads.

Blogs are becoming a powerful source for up-to-the-minute news from any particular place on earth, including those that might not have as much traditional media exposure. There are even occasions, more and more common as blogging increases in popularity, where individual’s or news blogs will scoop major news outlets like television and radio and get to a story of importance first. Big media is beginning to feel the sting and has made some changes, including blogs of their own. Thankfully many of the big media blogs that I have read are managed by real reporters with journalism degrees and credentials to match. This is a welcome addition to the often misspelled and misguided postings of some less-intelligent, albeit well intentioned, members of the blogosphere.

Some of the more prominent news outlets, including MSNBC in a large way, have begun to dedicate correspondants to blogs. Science, Art&Culture, Politics, News, and Pop Culture blogs have all found a home on MSNBC.com staffed by a good swath of intelligent folks. Several of these have made it onto my daily read list, if not my weekly one.

As time goes on, and I become more familiar with the content of a score of blogs, I have begun to frequent some of them to stayon top of certain issues. I have a blog i read about Israel, Iraq, Science, Pop Culture, Art, a blog about other blogs, and of course my friends’ blogs. These are the things that i make sure to read everday while I am surfing the net. I feel a lot better about becoming more informed via blogs, than i do about randomly surfing and finding dead-end links to stuff i really want to learn about. This daily encounter, and continual converstaion between blogs and bloggers is really beginning to change the way that people, online at least, are gauging the credibility and importance of issues.

Popdex.com, not only lists the top 50 sites linked to the most every single day, but the top 100 sites most linked to of all time. A simple scan down this list indicates who is being seen and linked. In the blogosphere spots on the popdex list are like the Gold Standard for credibility. Even if people don’t agree with what has been posted, the thought is that at least its being read, and in a big way.

The future of blogging is already here.

Beyond the text and pictures of most blogs, the frontier pioneers of blogging are hacking their trial trough the uncharted lands of audio and video blogging. Sending voice and video files to blogs from anywhere in the world their PDA’s have wireless access, these select few may be the precursor to where our increasingly electronically connected world is heading. Some leading electro-social theorists have conjectected several things possible in this interconnected world -- mass demonstrations organized by blog via PDA’s and cellphones, up-to-the-second news updates from any place occupied by anyone around the world, flash mobs, instant access to your favorite pundits... anywhere in the world.

Some of these things are already happening, in the U.K., Japan and even here in the U.S. The thing to decide is what are we going to do about it. Blogs are here to stay and there’s nothing that going to stop the phenomnen. Blogging is becoming more and more apart of many people’s daily lives. This is another tool that can be used to spread truth and reach out to people outside of our normal sphere of influence. I stay in contact with people in other states and countries through my blog, and there’s no lack of interaction on issues of faith. Even if its just to chronical your days, or to take a step towrad reaching out to people on faith, there’s no better time to blog than now.