The future will be blogged
What is blogging?
A blog' is the term for a web log, or an online diary. Like traditional diaries, blogs are updated frequently (often every day) and are arranged chronologically. Unlike traditional diaries, the world can read what you post. Blogging is therefore a process that can reflect the development of someone's thinking on any given subject. The success of blogging is partly attributable to the ease of use; adding to a blog is as easy as writing an email or a text message (both, incidentally, very popular yet very basic technologies). To add to a blog the blogger gives the post a title like the subject line of an email and then writes some kind of comment, which could be an opinion, an account of what's happened recently, a link to another site; anything, really. Blogs aren't just about words: Moblogging is also possible, where pictures taken with a mobile phone can be instantly and automatically posted to a blog.

The signs are clear: there approximately 50 million blogs and more are created each day 175,000 according to recent figures; universities are encouraging their students to blog (Warwick University is a good example); Google, Microsoft, AOL, Ask and Yahoo are some of the internet heavyweights investing in blogging services; and a Google search of the word blog' turns up fifteen times more results than Beatles'. You can be sure that the technology is here to stay.

Why should you care?
As a student of media, you should care about blogs because they present a challenge to traditional forms of media. In common with many forms of new media they are democratic; for example, anyone can offer their opinion on the day's news and have that opinion read by a worldwide audience. Blogs can even act as a check on the traditional media by offering news that isn't reported elsewhere or by challenging factual information. The multiplicity of voices in the blogosphere offers a challenge to the received wisdom of traditional media outlets. The authenticity and unmediated nature of a blog is often its most appealing virtue. Others see blogs in a more negative light, arguing that they can be opinionated, biased and unaccountable. I'd go further by stating that blogs can also be self-indulgent, boring, and poorly written. But that doesn't mean that they can't also be informative, powerful, and worthy of serious study.

Traditional media have tended to focus on the political aspects of blogging. Last November's presidential

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