Proposal
The Role of Blogs in the Media Environment
Nowadays, blogs take a more and more important role in the media environment. When they were first considered trends that won’t live long, now even experts ascribe them a major part of todays mass media. But how and in what way do these online platforms actually take influence in mass media?
What are blogs? „Blog“ is the short word for Weblog, which is composed of the words “world wide web” and “logbook”, so a blog can be understood as an Internet diary. The writer of a blog, named “blogger” is characterized by writing the “blogposts”, which are the entries on the blog. He tells stories or gives opinion on something, mostly on a specific topic the blog is about. In comparison to a website, a blog as (more or less) regular entries, which are sorted chronically. The newest entry is on the top while the older ones are at the bottom or sorted in an archive.1
History of blogs The first blogs developed in the late 1990‘s. The word “Blog” was first used by Jorn Bager, in 1997. He was one of the first people, who regularly wrote something on a web page in the Internet and called this thing a blog. When he was looking for similar sites to his one, he created a list of 23 blogs existing on the web. Within a few years, the number of blogs increased rapidly. According to estimates, there were approximately 173 million of blogs on the Internet in October 2011, with a tendency going upwards.2
1 2
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/blog
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/newswire/2012/buzz-in-the-blogosphere-millions-more-bloggersand-blog-readers.html
Research Paper in Communication Studies
The role of blogs Blogs developed from internet-diarys to platforms talking about specific themes and topics of any kind. Though they basically consist on personal opinion, they take a more and more important role in today’s media. Especially in