Blogs – Sources of Hidden Treasures on the Internet:

I have never been a technology buff, and thus probably the wrong person to ask about internet trends. Although I am taking a Communications class with a focus on blogs, and have found it quite interesting. In this post, I will talk about the value I have found in searching through blogs rather than other forms of media, internet, and television. I will use examples from blog links on my class blog. The class blog is at http://www.smuccpaclass.blogspot.com.

After browsing through my sources, I came to a conclusion: this is a treasure hunt! No, I am not talking about Captain Blackbeard, pirates, rubies, or gold doubloons. I am talking about the benefits of the right amount of work to hopefully find the right information. Searching for that information on blogs can contrast greatly with searching on television or a newspaper. The act of purchasing a newspaper or cable TV is a relatively simple exchange of currency for goods and services. You already have an idea of: what you’ll get; what it’s worth (hopefully worth the price you paid); and how it will help you in the future. Even so, this is equivalent exchange – you gain something (i.e., a product) for losing something of equal value (the money you spent on that product). That’s not treasure hunting!

Now with blogs you have a different exchange. You can dig (pardon the pun) for information without a clear idea of how much the effort will pay off in the end. In my own example, I carefully read a few blogs for research without browsing through others first. After all that work, I did not find what I needed. Thus, I wasted my time by not digging the right way. I started shoveling in the right direction when browsing through a set of links and then selecting what interested me. Both situations required time, effort, and concentration – but not money.

The “equipment” (i.e., your own blog), is free. Just check out http://www.blogger.com. Even though I am still learning about blogs, I was surprised that my own would be free. The only thing required is the work spent on it. So where did this idea virus start? I did not find the exact date, but according to a particular weblog, there were “just a handful of (that type of) sites” in 1998. In 1999, more people gradually had their own weblogs. In addition, the software and knowledge to make a weblog expanded. People debated over what a weblog was by definition. At this point, the benefits that everyday people could gain from browsing through blogs became clearer. For example, so-called “web enthusiasts” and “web editors” began to closely analyze what conventional news articles said. They compared articles of the same subject matter and formed personalized interpretations of these comparisons. Then the conclusions of these web editors would be posted on a weblog. The general public could then read these conclusions as “filtered” and “pre-surfed” by someone else. In other words, the treasure-seekers already had someone who “dug” for information and did the research for them! The link where I found this information is http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html.

Since that time frame, numerous groups have benefited from. They include businesses, the media, and everyday people. The search engine known as Google has utilized its blog to give “Googler(s) insights into product and technology news and our culture.” The media outlets of BBC News and CNN have utilized blogs so that their employees can post opinions on news topics. Third-party individuals can then comment on those posts. Now treasure hunting and equivalent exchange can come from the same place. The links for this information are: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/index.html; http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/; http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/ and http://www.cnn.com/?eref=rss_topstories/.

With Public Relations – a field typically associated as the liason between businesses, media, and publics – the blogging world has become a functional one for the clients of PR practitioners. According to Elizabeth Albrycht, an Editor’s Choice in PR Blog Week 2.0’s blog archive, blogs can become primary sources for networking. Put in greater detail, networking through blogs allows people to see a client’s network; thus, members of a client’s network can communicate with each other. I gathered from Albrycht’s article that the communication of those members amongst each other can be used as a guide to what the client’s next step might need to be. The article is available at http://www.globalprblogweek.com/2005/09/19/albrycht-blogs-network-building/.

The ideas and information that people can unearth from the blogging world can make for happy hunting in research and possibly the financial world. I am a novice treasure hunter. The hard work might be offset by what is unearthed, and then again it might not. But the work itself can sometimes be more rewarding than settling for equivalent exchange. Just like a weblog editor, people can form their own opinions on a subject based on interpreting their sources. It may take some work, but it’s free! Until next time, good hunting!