Jump in the Blogging Bandwagon

Image Source: Google.com

Blog is known as web-log in short, normally linked to personal online journal. Winer noted the blogs as the "unedited, published voice of people". Blogging is basically writing your thoughts in it and 'blogosphere' is the term coined by William Quirk, the 'intellectual cyberspace' that bloggers occupy. (Ferdig & Trammell, 2004)

Downes (2004) listed the benefits of blogging:

• blogging can help develop all sorts of critical thinking skils, writing skills and information literacy.
• offers people a chance to think of what they are writing and thinking
• allows people to carry on writing a topic over a sustain period of time
• provide a platform for readers and writers to exchange their information and thoughts
  

Blogospher

Image Source: technorati.com

From the diagram above, there is a 1.5 million blogs posted in merely just a week with 900,000 blog posts in a day! (Technorati, 2008) It clearly shows that the trend of blogging is unstoppable and growing at a fast pace.

Geography distribution of bloggers by continent.
Image Source: technorati.com

Judging from the pie chart above, it indicates that North America has the highest bloggers in the world followed by Europe at 27%, Asia at 13%, South America at 7% and lastly Australia at 3%. (Technorati, 2008)

In Europe, the bloggers tend to blog much about music and computers whereas personal musings and religions are less popular in Europe. Compared to make a living out of blogging, 60% of European bloggers blog for fun whereas 38% of Asian bloggers blog for fun. Besides, Asian bloggers prefer to blog about music and less politics and they are three times likely to have paid postings on their blogs. (Technorati, 2008)


In Malaysia

In Malaysia, most of the famous bloggers blog for politics. For example, Jeffery Ooi,
Dr.Mahathir Mohamad -our former Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, just to name a few. The benefits of blogs to Malaysia community is helpful especially during the March 8th election whereby the opposition managed to use blogs as their medium as they are not granted permission in mainstream media in gaining votes which lead them to win 5 states. (Star, 2008) stated that 70% of the elections results were influenced by information in blogs.

Star (2008) also claimed that Malaysia has about 500,000 active bloggers which is one of the highest after Indonesia and European Union.


Conclusion

Blogging is a trend that will keep on expanding and more people will jump in the bandwagon. It is a good platform to share and exchange information with lesser restrictions if users managed to maximize the benefits of it.


Reference:

Downes, S 2004, Educational Blogging, last viewed at 6th June 2009, http://www.masscue.org/publications/archive/educational_blogging.pdf

Ferdig, R & Trammell, K 2004, Content Delivery in 'Blogosphere', The Journal Online, last viewed at 6th June 2009, http://defiant.corban.edu/jjohnson/Pages/Teaching/BloggingBlogosphere.pdf

Technorati, 2008, State of the Blogosphere 2008- Day 1: Who Are the Bloggers?, last viewed at 6th June 2009, http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/who-are-the-bloggers/

Star, 2008, Blogging in Malaysia Ranks Amongst Highest in the World, last viewed at 6th June 2009, http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/4/3/nation/20827588&sec=nation