Page 86 - digitalliteracy

4.2 Communicating Through Blogs

your classmates and share information with them outside of class. Some social media sites,
such as LinkedIn, are also great ways to connect with people in professional careers you may
plan to pursue.

Do you remember Chantal from Module 1? She participates in several blogs and social media
websites. She follows the blogs of people in the marketing industry, where she hopes to work
after she graduates. She also uses LinkedIn to connect with people in the marketing field and
is hoping to apply for an internship through someone she met on the site. Chantal uses Face-
book to keep in touch with her friends and connects with several classmates she met in her
college courses through Ashford Café. These classmates are single moms, like herself, and
they understand the difficulties of attending school while caring for children, so they have
created a type of online support system for themselves. Let’s look at some specifics regard-
ing blogs.

Blog is a word created using the b
from the word web and the term log,
and refers to a discussion or infor-
mational website where you can usu-
ally post comments or questions and
responses to the comments or ques-
tions of others on various topics. The
first blog made its debut around the
year 2000, and by the end of 2011,
a national survey firm reported that
181 million blogs could be found on
the web. These numbers included
6.7 million people who publish their
blogs as websites, altogether known g-stockstudio/iStock/Thinkstock
as the blogosphere, and another 12 Blogs allow people to publish photos and chronicle
million people who wrote their blogs trips or life events and are accessible to billions of
on social networks (Nielson Company, people.
2012).

Blogs are a form of social networking, where you can connect with people who have inter-
ests similar to your own or exchange information and learn from others. WordPress, Blog-
ger, Quora, and Tumblr are four popular blog sites. These blogs often have a combination of
serious and more trivial topics. Tumblr (2016), for example, explains the content of its web-
site this way: “Stories, photos, GIFs, TV shows, links, quips, dumb jokes, smart jokes, Spotify
tracks, mp3s, videos, fashion, art, deep stuff. Tumblr is 244 million different blogs, filled with
literally whatever” (para. 2).

Some personal blogs are like a diary; people use them to chronicle a trip they are taking or
to update people about family events. Blogs are also used by political candidates and state
and local governments to reach out to constituents and gather opinions on important issues.
Clubs, businesses, and other organizations use them, as well, to report on their activities or
share information they believe is important to those who subscribe to the blog and follow it
regularly.

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