What's the Ballyhoo about Blogs?

This article was published in the journal Serials Review, vol 33, 2007, pp176-187. There are a ten authors, the first one being Jennifer Arnold. It's available (for Murdoch users) on ScienceDirect. Each of the authors describes her/his opinions on the pros and cons of blogs, whether they'll replace more traditional communication channels, and what the authors use them for personally. Pros include being a very successful way to market new services, events and resources, and the opportunity blogs provide to show a little more personality than an official website allows. Cons include the way that blogs tend to meld the personal and the professional (when used in a professional context). There are lots more ideas, comments and opinions in the article, and it's well worth a read.
I did agree with Sarah Morris when she said that as far as leisure goes, she'd rather read a book :-)

Game On

The title of this post comes from an article in The Weekend Australian of 15-16 September, 2007, in the Review section. It's on pages 4 and 5.
The article starts with, "The online worlds in which people play are rapidly reinventing media and entertainment, if not our concept of society, writes Peter Lalor"
So is he right, will the online world in all its permutations reinvent our concept of society?
The article quotes a suggested figure of 800 million people being registered members of an online computer game of some sort. Games are interactive and allow the players to engage, plan, and choose what they do, and be what they want, while being given "the power to defy geography, age, sex and the constraints of carbon-based molecules." Phew! Heady stuff! It's not all bad, either - the article quotes a father saying that one of his sons was forced to learn to read so that he could play his Nintendo.
Words such as intereactive, choosing, and being (ie not passive) could easily apply to all the Web 2.0 technologies - and they are so easy to use.