Two important publishing concepts that became very popular in the last few years have been blogs and wikis.Â
Blogs brought journalism to masses. Blogs allowed people to express their opinions and share their experiences with masses. The editorial structure of newspapers, magazines, TV and Radio stations, and other traditional media sources limited the views and ideas that could be brought to attention. There were sections like ‘Letters to Editors’ or ‘Public Opinions’ that were suppose to voice public opinion independent of the Institutional opinion. As in many other cases, Internet changed things.Â
Blogs became popular because Internet allowed democratization of publishing and search engines allowed equal opportunities in access. This resulted in a great rise of popularity of blogs. Millions of people started expressing their opinions on matters of diverse interests in their blogs. RSS emerged as a mechanism to provide rapid access to blogs making their timely availability a major factor in their popularity. New opinion makers emerged on the scene.Popularity of blogs started extending to audio, photos, and video also. Combined with emerging popularity of iPods, Podcasting and videocasting gained popularity. I consider Flickr as a form of photocasting.   People use their photos to share events and experiences in their life and to express their opinions through pictures and comments on pictures. This has become a popular medium to keep up with friends and also find out what is happening through photos. Clearly blogs remain the most popular of different media to share experiences and opinions. But this is going to be challenged by other media. Multimedia Blogs are going to emerge as a more powerful form of popular journalism, both at citizen level as well as at professional level, as more popular medium in the age of new media. Current blog mechanisms are creating silos based on the medium, which was natural given the technology of the last century, but in the 21st century that is neither natural nor practical. We will see the growth of multimedia blogs very soon.
Wikis has been another very interesting concept that became popular in the last few year. By opening the process of creation, one can utilize contributions and refinements by lots of people and could result in better and more exhaustive products. The success of Wikipedia as compared to other established encyclopedias is a great example of this process. But this is not limited to only encyclopedias. People have recognized the importance of the wiki concept ad have started using these as major collaboration tool.
Once again, much activity in wikis has been text oriented.