MediaVidea

Can Blogging change the world?

The jury is out on that. Sure, Blogging has changed lives of bloggers. Some bloggers have broken out and become authoritative voices – these were mostly the early birds. Others have brought new issues on the table, breaking stories faster than the main stream media – Don Imus, Mel Gibson, IIPM (India), Gonzalez’s Attorney firings, these were blogger success stories.

Some bloggers have become successful online publishers – Calacanis, Denton, Om Malik, Rafat Ali, Arrington, Darren Rouse, John Chow…

Some use blogs to further their name brands – Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin…

What about others? Remember, there are 70 million blogs and about 5 million active bloggers around the world.

Can bloggers bring important issues out in the public?

Seth Finklestein argues that the very breadth and spread of the blogosphere is acting detrimental to more voices breaking out, for two reasons:

1. Too many voices – too much noise and making yourself heard, via the filters of search engines, social media is becoming harder and harder.

2. The gatekeepers: The wild mushroom nature of blogs meant that filters of all sorts started popping up everywhere – Techmeme, Digg, Search Engines, Technorati.

Admittedly, most of the content out there is not worth spreading, but some indeed is.

It is no wonder that many blogs are Gatekeepers themselves and attract special attention from Mainstream media.

Rightly, Seth suggests that if a site like BoingBoing raises an issue, it will get picked up by the New York Times, while smaller bloggers have been writing about it for years.

Many times, this has been the case that an issue pointed by a smaller blog doesn’t get promoted by Dig and other gatekeepers until Techcrunch or others cover it.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “If you want to change the world, first change yourself.”

That means, if you care about an issue, blog about it, sure.

However, do more than just blog – go outside, meet people, evangelize it, talk to others, organize events, take part in events, use other tools apart from blogging, catch the next wave of online innovation early ...

And one day, the world will hear you.

Then, you can set about changing the world.

Labels: blogging, citizen journalism, web 2.0

posted by Pramit Singh @ 5:39 PM