Blogging has been interesting to get into. Its interesting to think about the two ways that blogging has intersected with my life, both in my job and in school. I have been required to blog for class once before this one, and found that it was very useful as the class was on music and sound and video links beyond those that we were given by the professor were easily shared between members of the class, which was very enriching to the discussions that we had. It was also nice that we could share these thoughts in a way that we might not have if they had been printed on paper. I didn’t really feel too much of a downside in this particular context in terms of what blogging could and couldn’t do.
For my job, it has been very different, albeit interesting. As I had mentioned in class, it is fascinating how blogging has impacted restaurants with such immediacy. At almost every pre-shift meeting, we discuss what has been blogged about, both good and bad. Here is where I feel some sort of limitations as well as benefits. It can be a constructive medium, as comments and criticism from 3rd parties reach us very quickly. No waiting for Zagat surveys or Tom Seitsema to come out with a review of our performance. We have a general (as well as specific) idea about what the public’s impression of us is. My reservations (haha..no pun intended) lie in the fact that the people who often blog either are predisposed to web-bashing for sport, or these web conversations turn into absolute derogatory blabber at times8426.html (like here, for example). Who are these people? Some of them I can guess, actually, but really. Does any of this have a place in this forum? Constructive? Not so much. Although I am a proponent of free speech and do feel that internet censorship could be potentially bad news, I would hope that open discussions would be more mature. I am overestimating. A lot of posts do the opposite, and are quite helpful and constructive. As another student had mentioned in class, one trusts a more nuanced and sane-sounding blogger rather than someone who is on a rampage. Either way, blogging is gaining popularity and can be quite powerful. Hopefully people take blog comments with a grain of salt as I believe they do, but the rapid pace of information exchange and publication does not cease to amaze me.
