Starting a blog

There was a time when teenage crushes were kept within diary pages and kept in a secret place away from prying eyes. Those days have come and gone. Journal these days are written, accessed and updated via a password on a computer in the World Wide Web.

Web journals are no longer created and read only by school-going teenagers, their content is not just about what happened in a day, and their use is not restricted to recording one's thoughts.

A web journal, or more commonly referred to as a blog, is one's "voice" in the big wide world. Anyone can start a blog on the Internet.

Most of the time, starting a blog costs nothing. A blog can also be made public if one chooses to share his or her published thoughts and opinions. Some blogs have thousands of readers a day.

People blog for various reasons. Amanda Ting, 16, currently in Form 5, started her blog just this year and chose to keep her blog private as it is her "personal creative outlet of expression" while Cheryl Tan, 27, a home-maker, started a personal blog in 2005 for expressing her "feelings and thoughts", and like many others, proceeded to have a second blog for public viewing, in Cheryl's case, for a joint online clothing business which she set up with some friends in 2008.

Technorati, an Internet search engine specialising in blogs, has been studying the growth, trend and impact of blogs since 2004 in their annual "State of the Blogosphere" survey. By 2006, Technorati has already tracked its 50 millionth blog and concluded that:

The blogosphere is doubling every six and a half months

About 175,000 new blogs are created every day

There are more than two blogs created every second

There are about 1.6 million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second

Two years on, the blogosphere has indeed expanded with Technorati clocking 112.8 million blogs by 2008. This figure, according to The Blog Herald, does not include the 72.82 million Chinese blogs counted by The China Internet Network Information Center. It begs the question, is anybody keeping count?

The growth of the blogosphere is staggering and its impact, startling.

During the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, blogging was a key forum for citizen commentary on everything from Sarah Palin's carefully coordinated wardrobe to Obama's hotly discussed healthcare policy. The 2009 State of the Blogosphere survey revealed that "on average, respondents think that the blogosphere was as accurate as traditional media sources on the presidential election and that it was, in some cases, much more up to date. Further, many bloggers believe that blogging was a big reason Obama enjoyed a significant fundraising advantage throughout the campaign". Nearly three in five bloggers surveyed believe that the political influence of blogosphere will grow even more substantially come the 2012 campaign.

In comparison, the influence of blogosphere in the political arena in Asia still lags behind traditional mediums such as the print and broadcast journalism.

At a personal level, creating and maintaining a popular blog requires hard work. It requires you to write frequently and write well. It can improve one's writing and thought processes as it forces you to present your thoughts in a coherent and interesting manner to stay relevant.

Many people find it easy to start a blog but realised that it takes time to maintain it. Alex Chua, 25, a pastry chef, who started his blog in 2006 said, "I was too busy with work to update my blog regularly and I soon lost interest in updating it." Blogs are useful for sharing pictures, ideas and interests, from parenting, movies, and music to recipes, travelling and trivial. In some industries, blogging is also instrumental in creating a profile for a business.

Blogging offers the insatiable appeal of freedom of speech and an unedited extension of your physical life. However, as with any medium and platform of communication, it has its shortcomings. There have been too many cases of friendships lost or people losing their jobs over fly-on-the-wall postings of their personal and professional lives that mindful bloggers are forced to conduct some form of self-censorship over what they write and the pictures they upload on their blogs.

That said, with its ability to interact and connect with people online, blogs can be a powerful medium in forging a common identity.

Check out a posting on "49 ways to identify that you are really Bruneian" on a local blog. It's worth a read even if you are not a Bruneian. So is blogging the new poetry or pure vanity? The jury is still out on this one. The Brunei Times