How - and why - to join the online revolution
Why blog? For the same reason people buy cargo pants (with a terrorist design), wear Crocs and use cellphones. Because everyone is doing it.
But what makes blogs different to Crocs and cargo pants is that 10 years from now, everyone will have a blog (something like a business card), except not only businessmen will introduce themselves, but brats too, through their blogs.
A 'Disruptive Technology’ according to Wikipedia is:
’...a technological innovation, product, or service that eventually overturns the existing dominant technology or status quo product in the market. Disruptive innovations can be broadly classified into lower-end and new-market disruptive innovations...’
It may sound like a mouthful, but essentially, disruptive technologies are very good for the average person. A good contemporary example is MXIT, which is giving the likes of Vodacom and MTN gray hairs in terms of losing their SMS market share. MXIT offers the same service at a fraction of the cost (each SMS costs around 1 cent).
Blogs are another excellent example of Disruptive Technologies, and in the same breath, so is Reporter.co.za. Reporter.co.za is essentially a user generated blog; it’s the crowd - you - sending us your thoughts and news. If you have a cellphone and an internet connection you can (possibly) compete with some of the best journalists out there. How? By being somewhere where they aren’t and couldn’t possibly be. You can!
Quality is a separate issue of course. People who are not trained to write, or take photos, do not always write stories or take photos that are worth the trouble to look at, or read. But sometimes they are. And sometimes they form the basis for the biggest news stories.
Some video footage for the 9/11 tragedy was provided, as I recall, by a Turkish tourist.* Someone’s cellphone provided us with footage on the London bombings, and recently, the ’London Bombings Again, Almost’.
A blog basically puts incredible power and resources into the hands of an individual. You don’t have to be a corporation with vast networks and resources to beam your message to the world.
Low Cost
A mere mouseclick in an arbitrary office or bedroom means someone you don’t even know (or someone you do know) can and read and see what an individual was doing over the weekend in say, Johannesburg, a place they might otherwise never visit (or even think to visit).
A blog also provides the curious Netizen who doesn’t have a blog, with the opportunity to virtually visit, at very close quarters, the lives and times of people from New York to Nieu Bethesda.
Exciting
I find that tremendously exciting, although obviously the limit on how exciting it is depends on how exciting the person is that is loading up whatever it is they are loading onto the net.
This is a good thing to bear in mind, I think, whoever you are. Is it meaningful, is it worth knowing, is it interesting whether relevant to me or not?
Content(ious) Issues
You can make your content interesting by doing a little background research. Google and Wiki some of the terms you’re using and see what others have commented on your subject. Most important, check your own work for mistakes. Once you put it up, those flaws, if they are present, are going to put people ever investing their precious time in your thoughts.
Another reason to blog is to reach out and form, organically in a sense, niche markets, niche communities. This is an area that has made bloggers very competitive.
For example you might have a blog about fishing (the world’s largest outdoor sport), and so with a consistent theme, and updated content, you will be reaching friends and/or strangers that particularly want to be associated with you - and there’s your community. It’s specialised, and customised. This is also what Facebook is all about.
How to blog
A good blog is one that has something new on it each day. That may sound easier than it is. By some accounts there are already 200 million ex-bloggers, since most people who start blogs don’t keep them up and running forever. Some believe blogging will peak at 100 million bloggers.** I think that’s conservative and shortsighted, since China has only just started.
In the end though, good blogs are like good newspapers and magazines. They are worth reading (or watching in the case of video blogs) if the writing (or video) is good. The same applies to this website. So when is writing good, and worth reading?
Many writers, especially citizen journalists underestimate the incredible appeal of local stories. Writing about some of the main stories (for example, the debacle concerning the Health Minister) means that citizen journalists have to compete with acres and acres of excellent broadcast writing on the same subject.
To compete effectively, citizen journalists must invest themselves HYPERlocally. That means, report what is happening in your neighborhood. I recently participated in a discussion*** on this subject, where the speaker spoke about a series of stories sent in by citizens on potholes, in the United Kingdom.
Ordinary people began to take photos of the nearest hazard (using their cellphones), and then sent them in to the BBC. This started a snowball, which led to the implementation of Google Mapping (to form a grid of all the pockmarked routes in England) and probably led to some sort of broader municipal effort to sort out the problem. This story started with hyperlocal content.
You can start a blog by heading to blogger, at www.blogger.com, and follow easy setup instructions. Or, you can make use of the audience that’s here, and encourage others like yourself to do the same, right here at Reporter.co.za. Go on, join the revolution!
*If you have more details on exactly who provided the 9/11 footage, please contact Reporter.co.za and let us know
**Gartner Report’s Top 10 Predictions for 2007
***http://www.andydickinson.net/
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