“One blog a day keeps the doctor away”

Well, my knowledge in blogging and why it has become so popular these days seems to be expanding for every day. Yesterday’s Trendspotting lesson started with Magnus telling the audience that a new study has shown that bogging has a positive effect on your health and memory. Unfortunately (inexperienced blogger as I am, with therefore quite bad memory) I forgot to write down the name of that research! But as we leave in an informative world where a simple google search can give you answers to everything, it took me less than a few minutes to find a similar article. Scientific American (a popular science magazine in US that usually brings articles about new and innovative research) published “Blogging--It's Good for You” in May this year and claimed that blogging (aka writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings) not only “serves as a stress-coping machine […] but also improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery.” And if you choose to believe this theory then self-medication may be the reason to why the blogosphere has taken off with such a rapid growth!

But let’s start from the beginning. What is a blog? How do you define it? And how did it all started? According to our own beloved Wikipedia a blog is “a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.”

Early blogs were simply manually-updated personal web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of the web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Gradually more and more people got a sweet tooth for this new innovative way of communicating their ideas to the society, and voilá.. A blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs as of December 2007.

There seem to be all kind of different blogs: personal, corporate, educational, medial, political, you name it! Everyone seems to be doing it, and I doubt that all of those 112 million blogs have only been created as self-medication or just because it’s trendy. There seems to be a higher reason to why all these people use their own time to update and maintain the blogs. What is it these people have in common? Well, the answer is simple: They are all trying to make their voice heard! Whether they blog about world’s environmental issues, macro trends, their own babies or toasters, they want someone to hear their thoughts and ideas to receive feedback, start a discussion or just to make other people to reflect over what they’ve just read.

This is not an unusual behavior and I can even give you a term for this activity - Citizen journalism (also known as public, participatory or democratic journalism) People without any professional journalism background use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others, which is exactly what we do by writing down our ideas, posting pictures and sharing links on our blogs. "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires" say Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis according to the seminal report “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information”

So it seems that a blog a day keeps not only the doctor away, but also makes people around you think! So start blogging! After all: “An apple a day, keeps the doctor away!”