Blogging in Journalism?

Introduction

At first emergence of blog, it is defined as a contraction of weblog. As the evolution of technology and its uses expanding, the definition of blog also evolves. The new definition of blog is a communication channel that is highly democratic and comprehensive. Blog has become the favourite media for most groups of people due to its popularity and influence in public user of internet. 

Weblog history is as old as the web itself. World Wide Web (www) was first implemented during 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee. At first, the web is seen as not important and only text-based but it has been used long by the scientists and programmers. Today’s blog are expected to change regularly which means they are frequently updated for the readers. During 1990’s, weblog has a different definition “the number of guest log into the website which the web administrator can see”. The word weblog was proposed by Jorn Barger to be use as today’s blog in December 1997. Jorn barger introduced the first word new defined ‘weblog’ in his site “Robot wisdom: A weblog by Jorn Barger” (Rettberg, 2008).

In early 1990's, blog was created as personal blog which the writer write about their daily life, routine, diary and about anything that they like or fancy. It is a bulletin board where other internet users can post comments, links and discuss. As the popularity of blog increases, journalists realize that blogging is a medium to express their writing skill in an inexpensive way. Blogs that written based on universal matters usually have a lot of follower. Followers are the readers that interested to follow the latest news posted in the blog or simply for the blog comment's thread.

Above are a few types of blog hosts that commonly chosen by most individuals including journalists. They are free to use, however, most of them insert advertisements along with blog posts. A follower may "follow" any blog by subscribes newsletter, web feeds such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom, or via Facebook. 

A simple tutorial on how to create a blog with Blogger.com. 

Blog search engine is a special web directory that will only list out blog sites so that bloggers with similar interest can find each other. The function of web blog search engine is nearly the same as web search engine. The only difference is web search engine will list out other website page lists.

Some journalist support the idea that blog can be used as the new journalism but others see it as a mockery (Quinn & Filak, 2005). It is a subjective matter to decide whether blog can be used in journalism or not. Journalism is defined as the investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to the public audience. Blogging can also fall into this definition. Despite the blog is well-known to the internet user, it is also have advantages and disadvantages to be consider.