Everyone’s a critic when it comes to blogging. This is probably because just about everyone blogs to some degree. I have three blogs in my blogger account (2 eROI blogs, and my personal one), which is a jump from the zero I had about 3 – 4 months ago.
Anyways, as blogging increases in popularity, more issues seem to emerge about the validity and future of blogging. Originally, I thought of blogging as some nerdy form of ranting taking place in parents’ basements across the world. Hopefully not too many people still believe this. True, there are a lot of personal blogs that could fit that description, but blogging is a major part of mainstream media now. TV programs use blogs to interact with their viewers, and people use blogs to find reviews of movies, TV, books, and other media forms.
There are tons of discussions about whether we should continue to blog or not, but it has been talked about too much already. I’d like to bring another question to mind. Assuming blogging stays, how should we go about determining the credibility of bloggers? In the old days, a reporter’s reputation and credibility was determined by the publication he or she wrote for. For instance, if I started my journalistic career at the Washington Post, I would be a more credible source than if I started at some small town paper. However, blogging is a relatively new form of communication. Do you think enough time has passed for us to know how credible each blog is? Do you think this is even a good system for measuring credibility? If not, how should we do it? Should we base credibility on blogs’ links to other media, like being part of a TV news program?
The beauty of blogging is that anyone can do it. All you need is internet access and something to write about; however, therein lays a major problem with blogging. With all the ideas and information posted online, some will be more reliable than others. I recommend looking at multiple sources to verify important news and facts, but with all the linking that occurs in blogging, it can be tricky. How many times have you searched for a story or article, and found that exact article in multiple places? What do you think? Posted by: Jeff Kempf at 9:42 AM  |  Permalink