Blogging

I recently heard some where on the news and for god sake don't ask me for a source because this isn't scientific or anything like that, any way, what I heard is that blogging is about two things. a) It is either about something you read or hear in the news and you get a strong feeling about it and then you decide to comment on it in a blog format, or --b) blogging is something like a personal diary where you write about your daily life activities, friends and family, pictures and songs, and so on and so forth. I happen to believe that these two definitions represent the closest thing that I have seen of what represent what the blog is all about. Blogging isn't an alternative form of Journalism, something that I used to believe some time ago when blogging was first introduced into our realm. Blogging isn't a platform for political activists although it was heavily used during the 2004 presidential election in the United States when thousands of Howard Dean supporters used the inter-net to raise money through their blog move-on.com. Blogging to a lesser extent is beginning to suffer the fate of what the traditional newspapers were facing when the blog-sphere started showing up on the internet. It is slowly being taken over by more advanced technologies such as you tube and what have you. Some people would rather watch thousands of video clips a day instead of reading a 250 word essay. Watching is a heck of a lot easier than reading, that is why we see our children glued to the tube watching cartoon from when they are very little, they prefer watching any hour of the day over reading a story or even listen to someone reading the story for them unless that some one is reading for them at bed time to help them fall asleep. So is blogging as we know it on its way to extinction? I don't know and I'm not going to be the one to forecast that inevitable outcome. The recent explosion of blogs throughout the globe is mind boggling phenomenon, millions of bloggs are being created in a very short period of time. I remember few years back when Yahoo groups were very popular, every one I know wanted to start a Yahoo group, and to be honest with you I started one my self and I managed that group for about a year and a half and there were at least 2000 entries by about 16 people that were in my group, but then comes a time when you start thinking what is this for! what is it all about! and then soon enough you start lowering the curtain little by little until you get to the zero point when the curtain gets shut tight. I'm wondering if this is exactly what happened to the crew that were managing Jordan Planet, they simply got burned out with all of the incoming entries all day and all night from all parts of the world, and in the end there was no reward to be had, not even a word of appreciation, just complaints after complaints, so whomever the decision maker was decided what the heck, I'm losing time and effort here that ends up being thankless, and so out of the bloom decided to put the planet to sleep. I'm sure that we will see many more discussion groups go to sleep as well, believe me I know, I started joining these discussion groups back in 1996, and since then I have been in and out of at least a dozen of them, Jordan Planet being the most recent one, before that it was netsonline.jo, and before that it was Mahjoob.com, and before that It was Jordannet.net, alawda, free palestine, palestine media watch, Arab writers, and many more that my memory fails me to remember all of them right now. In sum I have a feeling that blogging is going to go out of style, it would still be there but it wont be as effective as it has been over the past five years or so, I have a feeling that the future belongs to the tube which means that places like Youtube will have the upper hand in the coming few years, but as far as blogging goes, it will little by little fade away until it eventually vanish from existence or appears in a brand new format drastically different from the current format.