Week 1: What is the biggest issue facing blogging, citizenship and the future of media?

Topics of blogs are varied, ranging from personal diary (text, photo, video), educational blog, informative blog, news blog, even promotional blog, etc. In order to find out more about blog, I try to search for the keyword: “Blog” on Google.com. The result surprises me that there are not only personal blogs but also corporation blogs in the first 30 resutls. Corporation blogs such as Google Blog, Facebook Blog, Flickr Blog are used to provide information, product news and are aimmed to communicate with their users. In my experience of leaving comments on other people’s blogs, or look for comments on my blog, I find it annoying that there are many times that I need to go back to the blog that I have left comment on to check if the writer has replied me or not. Sometimes I find the reply that is dedicated for my comment, but it might be posted after several other people’s comments on the same blog entry. What I am trying to say is, will there be a more convenient way to communicate between blog writers and readers? Therefore, I think the biggest issue facing blogging would be its inadequate interactivity.

In terms of citizenship, when you sign up and create a blog on a particular webblog provider website, you are indeed joining this “virtual community” and become a “virtual citizen” on this community. Once you have created your blog, your blog will be registered on the user list of this website. Users on the website can search for your blog by keywords. Since there is no identity certification needed to create a blog, one can create as many blog as he or she can, and act totally different in each blog, and, to have “multi-citizenships” on this community. This cannot be happened in real life but can happen anywhere on the virtual communities. Therefore, this might be a problem in the future that provides a platform for the Internet crimes.