Blogging - so what's it all about ?

What makes millions of people around the globe feel compelled to write down their daily thoughts, and publish them for the world to see?
What forces are at work, driving these people to tell anyone who's willing to listen (or read) about their opinions, their day to day lives and everything and anything in between?

This is the first blog I've ever written, in fact, it's the first blog I've ever read!.I found it easy to avoid them, of all the infomation that we are bombarded with in our daily lives, blogs seemed to hold limited appeal- catering for a specific demographic, or simply being banal posts of someone's daily life.
Many blogs around take the form of online diaries, and i think this is where my desire to avoid them comes from - the fact that a diary is a personal log of ones life. Having never written my own diary, or had the desire to read whatever someone else has written down in theirs , diaries have always been something other people did. But an diary published online?

This is a paradox surely -a personal diary is something written by an individual for their own needs, and usually pains are taken to keep their thoughts secret and away from prying eyes, not published for thousands of strangers to have access to- who would have the diary printed in a daily newspaper? Are people's lives are becoming a soap opera for their readership on the World Wide Web ?.

Now i find myself in a position where I'm encouraged to keep a blog as part of my studies, and realise it's time to re-evaluate my idea of what blogging is about.

In recent years there has been a large take up of people using blogs, and the nature of their uses changing. Disgruntled employees are publishing exposes of their workplace, politicians are using them for campaigning tools, and as we have seen in places like Burma and Iraq at the moment, journalists are finding ways of bypassing the government run media to bring news of important events. . Photographs taken on mobile devices are put on the web with first hand accounts of the situation often before major news organisations have covered them providing instant comment on important events.

It's now becoming a dangerous game though, as some bloggers are finding themselves in court fighting libel or defamation charges, or are simply sacked by their employers after posting ill-advised comments. Bloggers have been imprisoned for posting anti-religious remarks, while others have had vicious insults and death threats in replies to threads they have posted. Today the bloggers in Burma are in fear for their lives as the government tightens in grip on all news and information leaving the country after recent demonstrations against the military dictatorship. Blogging and the Internet have bought the events there into the global arena. When the government responded violently to demonstrations in 1988 during which some 3,000 people were killed, news never made it into the public eye in the way it can today, reporters were simply not able to get the news out of the country.

So blogging has grown into a powerful tool, giving a voice to the individual, raising important issues and providing comment on current affairs with an alternative flavour to that provided by mainstream news broadcasters. Governments are uneasy with this flow of information, and seek tighter control over the Web - a person surfing the Internet in China will have much less access to sites, and outgoing Web traffic is restricted and monitored. But the Internet is a medium of communication that's developing at an explosivily alarming rate, and as it envelopes every sphere of daily life, total control over it becomes increasingly unlikely.

Dunno where this is going really, had nothing in particular to say, and I've just spent ages doing it. Not much of a blog, but ya gotta start somewhere.