The New Media Collective

As a blogger, you may have come across blogs that you like and may want to come back to. You may have even created a blogroll on your site of blogs that you read regularly, or at the very least, bookmarked a few to check out later.

To make things easier, there are many sites that are set up just to help you find blogs. If you're new to the blogosphere and are not familiar with them, this HOW-TO segment lists 12 blog search engines and directories to get you started. You can also list your blog on them so more people can find your blog site and learn more about you. Who knows? You may even make a few friends.

Continue reading "How To Find BLOGS" »

Posted by Melanie Morgan at 07:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a Business Week Online article I found reposted on DVRepublic. Although it may feel like it at times, we don't exist inside a bubble out here in the blogosphere. We put our thoughts, feelings, and images out here for the whole wide world to see. This is just to remind us as creators and consumers on online media that we have to stay up on what's going on out there, not only for ourselves, but for the children.

These days, social networkers are concerned about protecting their privacy, not only from predators and scam artists, but from nosy employers and campus authorities.

Social networker Shannon Sullivan was getting worried. Like all of her friends, she was spending much of her free time chatting, blogging, and sharing photos on the social-networking site, MySpace.com. But soon, the 14-year-old high school freshman had divulged so much personal information online—from her address and phone number to her birth date and names of friends—that she no longer felt she could surf safely. So Sullivan did the unthinkable: she suspended her MySpace profile.

"I was putting myself in harm's way," says the New Jersey teen, recalling the flurry of news reports in recent months of sexual predators and identity thieves prowling social-networking sites. Some of her friends share those concerns, she says. "With all these stories coming out, that's scaring people."

Continue reading "Big Brother Is Reading Your Blog" »

Posted by Melanie Morgan at 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This Amsterdam News article was reposted on Afro-Netizen on May 12, 2005, and I found it yesterday reposted on a site called Black Bloggin in an entry dated January 25, 2006. Ain't it great how truth never gets old?

By CHRISTABEL NSIAH-BUADI
Special to the Amsterdam News

With the acquisition of African-American media titans by corporate machines—the latest being that of Essence magazine by AOL Time Warner—there are very few places people can go to hear or read news content that reflects the increasing diversity of the United States.

In some ways, bloggers, independent journalists and writers who publish their own columns and articles online, have forced the mainstream media to investigate real news and maintain some level of diversity. Last year, bloggers were invited to both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions as part of the press corps.

Earlier this year, two liberal blogs, “Daily Kos” and “AmericaBlog,” exposed the real identity of the right-wing “journalist” Geoff Gannon (aka James Guckert). “Gannongate” was a top news story for weeks. And bloggers are regularly invited onto the top radio and TV news shows to provide an “alternative” voice on top news stories. But the most prominent bloggers, the ones who are regularly invited to provide this “alternative” voice, are overwhelmingly white and male.

Continue reading "Bloggers of Color Underrepresented
by Mainstream Media" »

Posted by Melanie Morgan at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes I find stuff on other sites that I believe is interesting enough to repost on NMC, so I'm introducing a segment called…er…REPOST, where I'll do just that. Why? Because sometimes a link just isn't enough.

The rise of blogging is often cast in black-and-white terms: blogs versus the "MSM" (the derisive term some bloggers apply to the mainstream media). But things may shake out more along the lines of journalism versus armchair yammering. Both can be, and are, presented on Web sites that call themselves blogs. Both have been presented in the mainstream media all along. "The State of the Blogosphere" presented at sifry.com this week by David L. Sifry, the founder of Technorati, a leading blog search site, shows just how complicated things have become.

According to Mr. Sifry's data, mainstream media sites, as measured by the number of blogs linking to them, are trouncing news-oriented blogs by a growing margin. Bloggers link to The New York Times Web site about three times as often as they link to the technology-oriented Boingboing.net. Only four blogs show up in the top 33 sites.

Continue reading "That Which We Call A Blog…" »

Posted by Melanie Morgan at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)