Growing up in California, in the Bay Area, I've always had the highest amount of exposure to the most advanced technology over the last twenty years. It has had a direct affect on me as I find myself more and more using computer technology almost to certain embarrassing dependency. Most days, I find myself trying to keep up to date on the emerging gadgets, rumors, and product reviews for all things tech. The whole revolution has made the Bay Area and San Francisco a very progressive place. Regardless, it is always fascinating to see what the rest of the world does with this technology.All things 'blog' surface in this class, and it is a topic that I'm finding I'm really not very familiar with. Blogs to me were always diaries or travel journals, or that one part of myspace where some of my friends write on and on about weird topics (and yes, I have a myspace page, for members only). I can't say that I've ever really used them before let alone considered them profitable. Through the class and resources provided by Professor Orihuela, I realize that nobody can simply ignore what blogs/web 2.0 are doing in todays world.
What's one of the hottest blog-spots in the world today? Iran. After English, Persian is tied with French as the second most common blogging language (click for story). In fact, the number of Iranians bloggers is even larger when one considers that many Iranians are writing in English to appeal to a broader audience. Back home in the states, political blogs have become the quickest way to access breaking news, blogs like the Huffington Post even advertise that they often break news before CNN and the TV networks. Information that had already globalized and convened with web 1.0, has now gone a step further. Blogs are only part of the information re-revolution. Social networking, in my opinion, has already achieved a distribution that dips into people who don't even regularly use computers. MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, etc. now are all accessed from work as well as home. People who would otherwise know nothing of HTML and CSS now edit their own profiles with Flash movies and animated text. These 'online friend indexes', already popular in the Americas, seem to be finding their own way in Europe as well.
Up Next: Web 2.0: What's Hot? (Click Here).
List of Social Networking Sites (Click Here).
