Blogging Experience Assignment

One of our last assignments for our blog was to write about our blogging experience.
In general, I really enjoyed blogging. I am very fascinated with Africa in general, and I like learning about areas of conflict. Well, I don’t exactly like learning about them, I wish they weren’t happening, but I like learning things that I cant’ learn via our main news sources. It frustrates me tremendously that we hear more on Iraq daily than Darfur. Not that Iraq should be ignored either.
Anyway, the whole blogging experience really opened my eyes to how vast the Internet is. And how much information is available on it! I was surprised at how much was available on Darfur, and when thinking about that I really came to terms with how much information is out there and so easily and quickly obtainable.
I had a lot of fun, usually, when finding new sites and seeing the multimedia coverage. My two favorite posts were the ones about the Washington Post page and the Google Earth. They were my favorite because I thought they did the most to bring light upon the atrocities occurring. Interestingly enough, they weren’t the most “fancy” and elaborated websites in their words. They just came out and said, “Look, this is what’s happening in this place in the world.”
Aside from the seriousness and horrors of the topic, I sometimes disliked having to blog every day. I enjoyed blogging, but some days when I was really busy I just felt like I had no time to blog and would have liked to expand on the subject more. I would suggest that the number of blog post not be as important, but the material and length of each blog post.
I hope to continue blogging about Darfur, only not as frequently. It keeps me well informed on the topic and also reminds me when I’m having a bad day that there are people out there who have it 100 times worse.
I think Blogs in general are a great Internet invention. I also think they can be a horrible way of getting news at times. But, as a guest speaker in one of my classes said the other day, blogs are bringing us back to the beginning days of journalism. When everything written was opinionated and, well, essentially, unfair. I think it’s good that we still have objective news via the television, print and news. And I hope that those mediums remain our main sources of obtaining the news. But I also like the idea of blogs. That someone can see some ones opinion on the matter. It gives a new light and different way of looking at a subject that the news mediums today can’t give you.
On a final note, I would like to say thank you to my family. I’m pretty sure they are the only ones who read my blog besides my teacher and my roommate when she was bored at work. Everyone was very impressed and encouraging about my blog posts. Especially my grandfather. : ) Thank you for waiting for my new posts every evening. I love you all! And a big thanks to professor Matson for showing us all, with great patience, how to blog!

More on Darfur tomorrow!