The new media landscape is evolving at unprecedented speed and one of its most powerful weapons yet is the mighty blog. It is arguably the year of the Blogosphere, a phenomenon that has profound implications for press freedom and human rights.
This online community is made up of over eight million people who regularly post material on the web-logs (blogs). It is built on the foundations of its predecessors -- newsgroups, websites, web forums and chatrooms -- but with some crucial differences. The network of blogs is more interactive than websites, more interconnected than newsgroups or web forums and more permanent than chat.
Blogging opens up unprecedented opportunities for the media and its ability to cover issues around the world. This was clearly shown in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami at the end of last year. It took only a few hours for text and video from Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia to be distributed across the web. These provided not just details for the news story, but also the individual stories that added a powerful personal element to the images of disaster.
Many blogs are connected with specifically political news websites, such as the US sites Znet on the political left (featuring Noam Chomsky's blog) and Frontpagemag.com on the political right (featuring David Horowitz' blog). However, mainstream news outlets are gradually recognising this potential and a number of major websites, notably the Guardian newspaper in the UK and Le Monde in France, have introduced their own blogs. These allow greater interaction between the outlets and their audience and the opportunity for them to learn from each other.
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