Bahraini blogger Mahmood al-Yousif works on his laptop at his house. Blogs started taking off in the Mideast a few years ago as access to the Internet and technology for creating sites grew. (AP Photo/Courtesy Mahmood al-Yousif )
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Blogging: news with a personal touch
Egyptian Abdel Kareem Nabil, known by his blogging name of Kareem Amer, was arrested in March 2006. He was convicted of insulting Islam and the president and served four years in prison. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)
By Michelle Bollinger
Twitter has received an unprecedented amount of attention for aiding in the revolution that swept Egypt in the beginning of 2011. Equally active in the movement, however, were bloggers. According to the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of the news links shared in blogs during the week of January 31-February 4 were about the revolution. These links, the researchers found, inspired forums for democratic conversations and peaceful venues for opinions. The Egyptians thank you for blogging.
By Brittany Bolz
The ordinary citizen’s point of view is not often heard, or much less, cared about. That is, until recently, when the boom of the Internet age brought blogging to the world at large. In a chapter written by Kaye Trammel and David Perlmutter titled, “Bloggers as the New ‘Foreign’ Foreign Correspondents” in the book From Pigeons to News Portals, they argue that blogging is extremely useful and serves in enriching the information the world receives about significant events.
Blogs first arrived on the Internet scene in 2006, quickly becoming a new source of reporting. According to Trammel and Perlmutter, blogs have many advantages over traditional news reporting and are heavily relied upon by journalists and citizens alike for the most up-to-date news. The creator of a blog can update it instantly and constantly throughout the day, giving personal, detailed accounts of his or her daily life. For example, the availability of the Internet may give a blogger in Iraq a platform to voice her personal views of the war and its effect on her family. In their article, Trammel and Perlmutter say that blogs give a personal touch to the “faceless” enemies on the other end. “No longer is the enemy an oppressed foreigner: he is someone with a family, someone we can receive updates from every day, someone the reader grows to care for and worry about.”
In this way, the blogs coming from overseas act as a foreign correspondent, giving readers up-to-date coverage, and adding much more personalization to the information being shared. The detailed posts are more like personal anecdotes than news articles. As Trammel and Perlmutter say in their article, “these posts dispatched from the front lines provide an insight and tell a story that an American deployed to the event cannot.”