Saturday, October 27, 2007

Vanity Blobs vs Informative Blogs

Well at first I thought the idea of a vanity blog was ridiculous. But I started to remember a little thing called "pen pals." For some of you, this is dated info. In the olden days, children, teens and adults would get connected with people from foreign countries. My pen pals were in New Zealand. We sent different artifacts to each other and corresponded through old fashioned mail. It was fun to receive interesting information from a person living far away. My sister's pen pal lived in Japan. I have a neighbor who met his wife through being pen pals as teenagers!
So my point is; Vanity blogs remind me of pen pals and also seem to resemble diaries. I think it's nice for someone to correspond with another individual from just about anywhere in the world. It gives first hand information about different people and cultures. People could possibly develop friendships this way.

Information blogs are just what they say... Blogs consisting of information. I work as a massage therapist and researched massage therapy blogs. I was somewhat hesitant because there's of ten negative connotations associated with this field of work. I was pleasantly surprised and delighted to find professional sites written by licensed therapists. I viewed the sites and discovered a lot of advertisement to do with massage schools, products, and conventions. There was also technical information being shared amongst therapist working in the field.

I am not sure that I would consider blogging something to compete with print journalism. Yes, I believe blogging is a terrific complement to journalism. There are very educated individuals with valid points. I just think I would lean towards print journalism first. Print journalism being on line as well as in a newspaper or magazine.

Over all, I have discovered things about the Internet that I did not know existed. I have a tendency to not want to spend too much time on line. I get antsy. But, this class has forced me to sit and do the research. There is an amazing amount of worthwhile information for anyone of any age. Blogging is a phenomenon that will surely be around for many years to come.

1 comment:

Ashley said...

I thought it was very clever of you to relate pen pals to vanity blogs. It made me think of them more fondly than I had before.