Blog
MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic.
The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users who did not have much experience with HTML or computer programming.
[3] Blog owners or authors often moderate and filter online comments to remove hate speech or other offensive content.
Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject or topic, ranging from philosophy, religion, and arts to science, politics, and sports.
[9] Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, Byte Information Exchange (BIX) and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists,[10] and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earlier bloggers,[16] as is Jerry Pournelle.
This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters.
Some early bloggers, such as The Misanthropic Bitch, who began in 1997, referred to their online presence as a zine, before the term blog entered common usage.
[15] The evolution of electronic and software tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible for a much larger and less technically-inclined population.
Lott's critics saw these comments as tacit approval of racial segregation, a policy advocated by Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign.
Television journalist Dan Rather presented documents on the CBS show 60 Minutes that conflicted with accepted accounts of President Bush's military service record.
[26] By 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services, and candidates began using them as tools for outreach and opinion forming.
Even politicians not actively campaigning, such as the UK's Labour Party's Member of Parliament (MP) Tom Watson, began to blog to bond with constituents.
U.S. President Barack Obama acknowledged the emerging influence of blogging upon society by saying, "if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, then what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void, but not a lot of mutual understanding".
Many bloggers, particularly those engaged in participatory journalism, are amateur journalists, and thus they differentiate themselves from the professional reporters and editors who work in mainstream media organizations.
[citation needed] The first known use of a blog on a news site was in August 1998, when Jonathan Dube of The Charlotte Observer published one chronicling Hurricane Bonnie.
The following bloggers (and others) have appeared on radio and television: Duncan Black (known widely by his pseudonym, Atrios), Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (Daily Kos), Alex Steffen (Worldchanging), Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette), Nate Silver (FiveThirtyEight.com), and Ezra Klein (Ezra Klein blog in The American Prospect, now in The Washington Post).
Similarly, it was Emergency Preparedness and Safety Tips On Air and Online blog articles that captured Surgeon General of the United States Richard Carmona's attention and earned his kudos for the associated broadcasts by talk show host Lisa Tolliver and Westchester Emergency Volunteer Reserves-Medical Reserve Corps Director Marianne Partridge.
There are examples of bloggers who have published books based on their blogs, e.g., Salam Pax, Ellen Simonetti, Jessica Cutler, and ScrappleFace.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs), in general, are immune from liability for information that originates with third parties (U.S. Communications Decency Act and the EU Directive 2000/31/EC).
In January 2007, two prominent Malaysian political bloggers, Jeff Ooi and Ahirudin Attan, were sued by a pro-government newspaper, The New Straits Times Press (Malaysia) Berhad, Kalimullah bin Masheerul Hassan, Hishamuddin bin Aun and Brenden John a/l John Pereira over alleged defamation.
In the United States, blogger Aaron Wall was sued by Traffic Power for defamation and publication of trade secrets in 2005.
"[60] Wall and other "white hat" search engine optimization consultants had exposed Traffic Power in what they claim was an effort to protect the public.
[61] In 2009, NDTV issued a legal notice to Indian blogger Kunte for a blog post criticizing their coverage of the Mumbai attacks.
[66][67] This case highlighted the issue of personal blogging and freedom of expression versus employer rights and responsibilities, and so it received wide media attention.
[70] Mark Jen was terminated in 2005 after 10 days of employment as an assistant product manager at Google for discussing corporate secrets on his personal blog, then called 99zeros and hosted on the Google-owned Blogger service.
As of 2006[update], Cutler is being sued by one of her former lovers in a case that could establish the extent to which bloggers are obligated to protect the privacy of their real life associates.
In Singapore, two ethnic Chinese individuals were imprisoned under the country's anti-sedition law for posting anti-Muslim remarks in their blogs.
[83][84] In Myanmar, Nay Phone Latt, a blogger, was sentenced to 20 years in jail for posting a cartoon critical of head of state Than Shwe.
Kathy Sierra, author of the blog "Creating Passionate Users",[86] was the target of threats and misogynistic insults to the point that she cancelled her keynote speech at a technology conference in San Diego, fearing for her safety.
