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Blogging in itself is something that must be up kept with constantly. Ideas must be flowing rapidly to keep readers engaged in the specific blog. Imagine live blogging, where all posts must happen at a rapid pace without hesitation. In the two articles, one by Katy Torgovnikov, “The Dangers of Unverified Content & Tips Living Blogging Disasters” and the other article by Roy Greenslade, “Research Reveals Popularity of Blogging,” I learned that there is a rising popularity with live blogging; however with anything that is popular, there is always a downfall.
Live Blogging has proven to be more widely used as a way for people to gather news, gossip, and just anything going on worldwide. Live Blogging is something that is popularly used due to its easy access and readily available information. In the Greenslade article, something that stood out to me was the idea of live blogging being something of preference especially in the work place. People at work prefer the live feeds of news that are easily accessible online to be able to stay updated at work. The live blogging also is an easier read than an actual newspaper in the sense that readers can skim through to grasp the ideas of the post. These factors have contributed to the outstanding number of live blogs receiving up to 300% more views than a conventional online article. Articles are on the more well crafted side because that author takes time to produce an article for the audience. Where as live blogs are done within minutes of receiving news to just put out the information to the readers.
Twitter is a social network that has been widely utilized not only for social/personal accounts, but also for news related accounts. Many live blogging posts happen via twitter and that only permits a post worth 140 characters at a time. This gives readers a constant flow of quick posts related to the most current news updates. Sometimes within the quick tweets there are actual articles attached to allow readers to further read the news. To the left is a picture of a graph involving a survey of Twitter usage and where it is mainly utilized. I thought that was interesting to include. I know as a college student, social media is the quickest way to receive current news. I can easily access twitter from my twitter app on my phone and stay somewhat updated with things going on around me. With everything that seems great, there is always a downfall. The downfall with live blogging is that the information may not always be as accurate as a well written article. An article gathers sources, investigates, interviews people, etc. to provide readers with the most accurate information as possible. A live blog has the goal of getting the information out as quickly as possible. That information may not always be accurate. In Torgovnikov’s article, the idea of false content is brought up and to me that was a very big point. False content is something that is almost inevitable in live blogging because people want to quickly post those tweets as fast as possible to keep readers enticed in their blogs. It was mentioned that bloggers on twitter tweet almost every 20 minutes for 6 hours. That’s a lot of different news coming in on twitter! This false content idea reminded me of a twitter incident about two years ago. A girl tweeted that she needed help and implied that she was kidnapped. This tweet hit the internet like wild fire! Every media network was in search for this girl, all the news reporters kept a live feed readily available for readers, and there even was a hash tag created to find this girl.
This one tweet (pictured to the left) grasped everyone’s attention and the hash tag “#helpfindkara” was created. It turned out that the girl created a kidnapping hoax. This was the top news for two days and it turned out to be all false content. This goes to show the great impact that live blogging and twitter have on the world. In minutes this girl Kara went from being the most worried girl on twitter to the most hated. People are very invested in their tweets and the content of their tweets. To read an article about this Kara twitter instance, please click here.