2005 and 2006 saw the popular recognition and commercial embrace of a phenomenon which is set to deeply affect the intellectual life of developed and developing nations for years to come. Yahoo! bought Flickr. Google acquired YouTube. Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace, and declared the future of his NewsCorp empire to lie in the user-led content creation spaces of such social software Websites more than in its many newspapers, broadcast channels, and other media interests (Murdoch, 2005). Finally, TIME broke with its long-standing tradition of nominating one outstanding public figure as 'person of the year', and instead selected 'you': all of us who are active in collaborative online spaces (Grossman, 2006).
This collection of original essays addresses a number of questions seeking to increase our understanding of the role of blogs in the contemporary media landscape. It takes a provocative look at how blogs are reshaping culture, media, and politics while offering multiple theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the study.
Globalization and the internet have created a space for news and political discourse that overrides geography and increases opportunities for non-mainstream, citizen-based news sources. Drawing a distinction between emerging citizen and professional media, this study examines one rapidly expanding and increasingly influential citizen news source - weblogs. We analyzed the linking patterns, the online network led to by six of the most popular news and political weblogs to study their relationship to other weblogs and the traditional professional news media in the USA and internationally. Findings suggest a more complementary relationship between weblogs and traditional journalism and less echo-chamber political insularity than typically assumed. The blogosphere relies heavily on professional news reports and half of its linked-to sites can be considered non-partisan.
Bono, who is usually meticulous in how he manages his personal brand, strategically shrouding it with selflessness, passion, vision, mystery, and a bigger-than-life conviction for positive global change, potentially underestimated or simply didn't understand how Social Media has re-architected the rapid distribution of information and content.
Today's thirst for news images at the click of a mouse does not sound the death knell for the photojournalist keen to illustrate the story behind the headline, claims Getty Images.Picture credit: Tom Stoddart/Getty Images