Did Joe Blogs Blog? and if Joe Bloggs Blogged why Bloody Bloggs Bother?

Blogging today has taken on a life of its own beyond all recognition from a few years ago. What started off as an online diary has now become a completely immerse online experience that goes way beyond simply reading some body’s own thoughts.

When I was younger I wanted to be a football commentator or somebody who wrote up reports on games for a newspaper. Little did I know that in order to fulfil that dream I would be using skills that I first learned years ago for a completely different purpose.

I guess the marriage of computers and sport shouldn’t be such an alien concept, after all some of my favourite computer games were based on sport. Two of them in particular have helped influenced why I want to be a Sports Journalist, Championship Manager/Football Manager and Pro Evolution Soccer. Both games filled so many of my social hours that I suppose it was inevitable that my working life and my social interest would come together at some stage.

However I digress! something that is easy to do whilst blogging. That leads me back to my original point, blogging is no longer blogging. ‘Blogging’ started as being a term used for those that recorded their thoughts online but now with the advances in technology it’s far more then that. Blogging is now about sharing your life, not just your thoughts, but what you watch, what you read, what music you are listening too and showing people the things you’ve seen.

Being a trainee journalist the importance of blogging can’t be understated. Blogs are now used by all the mainstream media to help share what they believe is worthwhile news and opinion with the world. In the ‘old days’ people used to get their information through a written newspaper, then the telephone, radio, tv and now finally the Internet. In order to really connect with an audience you need to be in the places that an audience is and more and more the audience can be found online.

Over the next 11 months or so I’ll be here in Falmouth learning how to become a broadcast journalist and part of that is going to be learning how to connect with an online audience. I consider myself (un)fortunate enough to have spent enough of my social life online to be able to connect with a certain type of online audience but this blog is going to be my chance to try and practise different approaches and styles.

I don’t know how much I’ll update, what will appear on here or how I’ll use it but I hope that I can use this blog to share my experiences whilst I do this course and if anything, give myself a place to sort my own thoughts out.

~ by wimbles on October 30, 2008.