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 11: A Wonderful Global Blogger

After reading the interview “Making Global Voices Heard: An Interview with Rebecca MacKinnon” in Blog!: How the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein I visited one of the blogs that MacKinnon talked about. I visited the blog called Kenyan Pundit (www.kenyanpundit.com) It looks like a blog… well it has a picture of 3 vans on the side of the road at the top. I don’t really know what it is actually. The author is Ory Okolloh. She writes informally but very strong. There are a few different topics on this blog. They range from talking about jobs in Africa to talking about business to sort of a mommy blog. It isn’t focused on her little girl (who is cute as a button I might say) but she asks for advice on feeding and gives updates on milestones in her child's life, which is neat.

She still does criticize news stories but I don’t think I see it as much in her recent posts. She still is linking to other Kenyan Bloggers, a lot actually there are 39 Kenyan blogs and then lots more African blogs. It still corresponds to the reading though because she is still doing what she used to. I think now I even like it more because she has some of her personal life in there and I think it is good to show some personal touches in your blog.

However, does the evidence I’ve cited prove conclusively that Kenyan Pundit has stayed completely how it was before? No, I’m just saying that in my opinion I see her blog as the same with a few extra posts that are neat as well.

Lindsay