HW 19: The Tangled Web of Influence

After reading the chapter “Web of Influence” by Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein there was one paragraph that really stood out to me. This paragraph is on pages 87-88 and talks about how you need to have links to your blog on other blogs to get people to read your own. One sentence that I really like was “Thus, in the blogosphere, the rich (measured in the number of links) get richer, while the poor remain poor.” In other words, people who tend to have more links out there, the more viewers and readers they will have. On the other hand people who have vey little to no amount of links out will have the same result in readers. For example, my blog probably doesn’t have very many links because it is for a class while the blog at www.crookedtimber.org has many links. My conclusion, then, is that people should get the word out on their blogs to get more people to read them!

Lindsay

HW 2: How Blogs are Connecting Countries

In the chapter called "From Cave Painting to Wonkette: A Short History of Blogging" from David Kline and Dan Burstein’s Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture they mention 12 key ideas about blogs and how they are changing. One of these ideas is that blogging is going global. I really enjoy learning about what is going on around the world. I like to watch the news in the morning so I can see what is happening outside of my state. I have never really read any blogs that are from other places; actually I have never read any blogs at all. This is all a new thing for me. Even so I think that this statement, that blogging is going global, is very true. We can see in other cultures nowadays the American influence. Blogging will and already has left its mark in other countries. We see by the book we are going to be reading Baghdad Burning by Riverbend it can give insight into other nations or cultures that would otherwise be edited by media filters. This book also shows us that blogging can give marginalized groups in different countries, that don’t have the rights that Americans have in the US, a voice. All in all I think that blogging going global is a great opportunity for others to speak as the wish.

Lindsay