Blogs, the more popular term for weblogs, are seen as a genre of social software. Blogs began proliferating in the early 2000s due to the advent of blogging software such as Blogger, Wordpress, and Moveabl Type.Today, the number of bloggers continues to increase daily.
The impact of blogging to student is providing a virtual platform for participation for those students who hesitate to talk in classroom. For example, sometime the student considers himself or herself as a passive student in term of in-class interactions. On many occasion, they hesitate to express their thoughts to the class or respond to the instructor’s and classmates’ opinions. Thus, for those students, they using blogs as a means to increase class participation in fact help them learn.
In addition, sometime there are have some student commented that “traditional classroom learning is usually teacher-centred and discussions in class cannot reach the conclusions, and people who are self-conscious usually do not participate”. However, people treat blogs as personal space, and in turn, are more willing to speak up.
Sometimes, the student perceived receiving feedback from others as appositive experience. For example, the student is like to read others’ comments and critiques on their blog posts; however, the premise is creating a blog site that has meaningful content and uniqueness. It also will help the student to get the motivation to write is knowing that he or her may receive responses from others. Therefore, I think blogs have positive impacts on the effectiveness of learning.
Besides that, the internet created a platform to enable free flowing communication and information exchange, but it wasn't until blogging hit the mainstream that the web became a medium to capture society's stream of consciousness. People of all backgrounds, interests, and biases now contribute to the global discourse on human affairs.
There are many impact of blogging to society. Nowadays, blogs have become a big business with a couple of recent blog networks being acquired by large companies. For example, America Online purchased Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for an estimated $25 million. Weblogs, Inc. is a network of over 85 blogs covering a variety of topic areas. Now, new blog networks are popping up and it will be interesting to see if the traditional media outlets acquire the popular blog networks much as they did popular content sites in the late 1990s.
For individual blogs, it is a common practice to use Google Adsense as a means to earn money through advertising. While most blogs earn in the tens of dollars per month range, some of the most popular blogs reportedly earn thousands of dollars per month.
Apart from that, Political blogs are some of the most common blogs in the blogosphere. For example, Dato' Seri Abdullah Hj. Ahmad Badawi is a Malaysian politician who has served as Prime Minister since 2003 use blogging as a way to reach out to his supporters. Through blogging he was able to establish a loyal following before the traditional media outlets took him seriously. Now, it is common practice for political candidates of all levels to use blogs as a campaign tool.
In conclusion, blog is a great environment to read other people's ideas, those ideas may not always be fact-based, insightful, or politically/culturally correct. However, blogging does provide anyone with access to the web a way to write about anything they want and potentially reach a global audience. This has not been possible in the past and we've only begun to see the consequences.The only real question is when are you going to start a blog?
