Isiah 1:17- Learn to do well. Seek justice, Relieve the oppressed, Judge the fatherless, Plead for the widow.
The year is 2025, do you know what this means?
I started this blog this month in 2005 and that means this blog is 20 years old. Perhaps the question to ask is why have I been posting here for 20 years?
How many of you have been here since the beginning?
And do you follow the "Beta" blog?
And how many Presidents since I started this blog.
There are about 31 million blogs in the United States, a number expected to swell to 34 million by the end of this year. But Mr. Harbison is part of a small but growing trend of blog quitters. Last year, the number of blogging teens and adults ages 18 to 33 declined, in the first reported drop in blogging, according to Pew Research Center data.You know as long as there is information out there to share, there is no reason for me to quit. I have no family yet and I have the time to blog. I also would use Twitter to supplement my posting and people have been know to Retweet my posts. Also while do have a Facebook account I prefer to keep that for more private purposes for right now than anything else. As you see I do have some FB widgets that show which posts are being shared or liked by FB users.
Some have simply switched to another blog-like medium, say, Twitter or Facebook. Others have faced unpleasant facts about blogging. It's cheap to do but usually doesn't pay. Having a platform may be fun at first, but building a following takes much more work than simply typing and posting.
And millions of them go virtually unnoticed, despite the occasional breakout sensation like the humorous “Stuff White People Like” and the Julia Child-inspired “The Julie/Julia Project.”
When “people see these, they say, ‘I can do that—it will be easy,' “ says Raanan Bar-Cohen, vice-president of media services at San Francisco-based WordPress, which hosts 16.5 million blogs. “If you're looking for fame and fortune, blogging has as good a chance as any medium,” he adds.
But new bloggers misunderstand what the venture is really all about. “The best bloggers are good at highlighting, snipping and curating,” Mr. Bar-Cohen says. All that draws “the feedback that is as or more important than the actual posts.”
Here's more about the organizing aspects of black blogs. It seemed that the ones I know of were really organized about talking about Jena. Indeed they particularly got active:With its power-to-the-individual approach, the new media world promises anyone with a laptop the possibility of a publishing empire. But, as some black bloggers are finding out, the new media world is a lot like the old one: racially segregated, with many prominent black voices still fighting to be heard.
Some bloggers felt insulted this month when the Democratic National Committee selected 55 state-oriented blogs to cover its convention in Denver; critics said few featured African American voices. The DNC said race wasn't considered in its selection from 400 applicants. Officials were more interested in the sites' audience size and how much chatter about local issues appeared on them. The DNC answered critics Thursday by adding several sites led by African Americans to its general blogger pool.
But some critics say the DNC situation is indicative of a larger media divide. It's a division in which stories like the racially motivated beating in Jena, La., last year lingered for months on black blogs and talk radio before the mainstream press picked up the issue.
That coverage gap is partly what inspired Gina McCauley to help organize the first Blogging While Brown conference this summer in Atlanta. The most popular online community conferences - like the Netroots Nation confab that grew out of the Daily Kos blog - tend to be predominantly white gatherings.
"The progressive blogosphere is segregated," said McCauley, whose What About Our Daughters blog was accepted to the DNC's blogger pool. Essence magazine named McCauley one of its 25 most influential people last year alongside Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and filmmaker Tyler Perry. "Black bloggers link to other black bloggers, and progressive white bloggers link to other white progressive bloggers," she said.
Go read the whole thing. There's even a brief mention of the state of black media. Black newspapers aren't doing so well. Plus it would be nice if blacks can own more than 0.6% of all TV stations in the nation. Although to be sure owning a TV station is difficult. BTW, we do own 3% of radio stations one of which is surely WVON-AM in Chicago.Some African Americans see an easier chance to have their voices heard in the online world, and black voices there are growing not only in number but in influence. Last September, Wayne Hicks' Electronic Village blog ranked 75 black blogs on his monthly list; now he charts more than 1,250.
Hicks, who heads a nonprofit foundation, also is a member of AfroSpear, a collective of 140 blogs that focus on the black experience and gather momentum behind social justice issues like the racially charged incident involving a beating in Jena, La. Then there's San Francisco's ColorofChange.org, which envisions itself as the "black MoveOn." It has grown from 100,000 members to 417,000 over the past year, many of whom joined the organization after it publicized the Jena incident and pressured the Congressional Black Caucus to oppose Fox News' plans to host a presidential debate.
"I'd say that the new black voices are much more organic than those of the past. They don't need to emanate from the pulpit in order to be heard, or to inform, or to galvanize people from across the nation," said Avis Jones-DeWeever, director of the National Council of Negro Women's Research, Public Policy and Information Center. "These voices epitomize the next evolution of black political activism."
There's a difference in the types of stories that black and mainstream media cover, McCauley said. While some in the mainstream might analyze the influence of large media corporations on the Internet, black bloggers might focus on shows produced by Viacom-owned TV networks like VH1's "Flavor of Love" and question the cartoonish depiction of African Americans.
And when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton mentioned Robert F. Kennedy's June 1968 assassination while defending her decision to continue her presidential campaign, "a lot of the mainstream media covered it as a statement unto itself," said Hicks. "But in the black community it was part of a pattern." He, like others, noted that Clinton made her statement four days after the Roswell (Ga.) Beacon put a photo of Obama on its front page with the crosshairs of a rifle scope over him, and former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made a joke about somebody aiming a gun at Obama during a speech to the National Rifle Association.
"The mainstream media had a reason to look at black voices in the media because of the Obama campaign," Hicks said. "But these voices have always been out there."
