Blogging as current Phenomenon and effects on Community.

The term "blog" (short for "web log") simply describes an online diary or journal. It is an ongoing documentation and can be made up of many different forms of media, including writing, images, video clips and pictures.This brings to show blogs are multimodal texts. The incorporation of spoken or written language, still or moving images and produced on paper or electronic screen as stated by (Walsh 2006) uses more than one mode thus multimodal text.

Size and Trends of current Blogosphere

A blog analysis firm, Technorati.com who search, surface and organise blogs, report that they are now tracking about 112.8million blogs worldwide, including those tagged that are over 250million.

Blogging is a form of journalism and the proof of this concept is the decline of newspaper readership in Europe and North America. The PANPA Bulletin, (July 2004) state that the rapid growth of broadband in many counties means people are spending less of their leisure time watching television, preferring to surf the net to obtain news.(Conley, Lamble, 2006 p.6).

In Europe, Asia, Malaysia and Kenya too the internet is an alternative source to get information. Blogs are greatly increasing in number because people can discuss daily on issues that affect their lives. The blogs that exist are of all types depending of peoples interests. They range from personal, technology, political, business, and even literature. In Malaysia personal and political blogs are most prevalent.

Malaysia:

74% - represent bloggers below 25 years

64% - represent female bloggers 
56% - represent the bloggers who prefer blogging because they wish to express their opinions without being controlled.

In a study known as ‘Blogging Asia: A Windows Live Report', conducted online on Microsoft's MSN portal (prnewswire, 2006) which covers all the seven markets in Asia which are Hong Kong, India, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. The trend discovered was that about half of online populations in Asia have blogs.

Europe

Blogging is not prevalent in Europe as it is in Asia but it will soon take off although it is very slow. This is confirmed by a survey of 1,500 business leaders from Europe’s top 15,000 companies questioned on blogging. According to NevilleHobson.com (2006) the result of the survey is as follows-
42% - have heard of blogs but don’t read or contribute to them
37% - are not aware of blogs
11% - said they read blogs
7% - monitor blogs
7% - find blogs useful as source of business information

2% - write blogs.

References:

Conley, David & Lamble, Stephen (2006) The Daily Miracle An Introduction To JournalismOxford University Press. Third Edition,

Technorati.com viewed at http://www.technorati.com/about/

Research on Malaysian bloggers viewed at http://blogger-research.blogspot.com/2006/11/blogging-asia-windows-live-report.html