Evaluating Bloggers.

The three Blogs I have decided to follow are: Business Insider (www.businessinsider.com ), Wall Street Journal ( www.online.wsj.com ) and The Economist ( www.economist.com).

Let’s take a closer look at each one of them and discuss their usability and usefulness.

Business Insider:

I have personally signed up for alerts from this blogging website as I feel it contains/reports very relevant information about business and finance in language I can understand. Call me a bit superficial, but Business Insider doesn't deal with hard economic facts and ideas, but rather gives financial and economic news a social spin…a little bit like gossip! It does however create an online environment that allows for shared opinions, from which we can all learn – sort of like a moderator of business/financial opinions. It does also allow for someone to follow things other than business or finance; you may also find a Tech Blog, Politics, Strategy, Life and Entertainment. I receive several daily updates from this source and I like it.

Wall Street Journal:

This is a blog I visit about 2-3 times per week. This is a little bit more advanced than business insider, as it allows for news from all over the world via its “editions”. I find there is a lot more information readily available here which is categorized via: Business, Tech, Markets, Market Data, Your Money, Opinion, Life and Culture, Real Estate and Management. This site is a bit more interactive but it is harder to navigate because of the abundance of information. You need a long chunk of time to sort through blogs and announcements unless you know exactly what you are looking for.

 The Economist:

I visited this blog about 1 or twice per week, and I have to say out of all of them, I was least interested in this one. Although some of the information contained was very insightful, most blogs that were business and Finance related did not interest me. It is possible for that to be the case because I don’t normally keep up with such blogs and I don’t have as much knowledge about current businesses and financial markets as I want. Therefore, for most of the articles I have had to do some background information legwork to understand the full context of the content. This blog also contains different categories, similar to the ones described above and you can choose the topic of your read accordingly.

Advantages/Disadvantages of blogging

Some of the advantages I can think of from both a customer and a business perspective and  are the following:

·         Quick Real time information – read about it as it happens

·         Space – not held back by “number of pages.”

·         Easy to read – zoom-in available as it is read via electronic device.

·         Large market reach – younger generations especially

·         Allows for interaction of readers – able to quickly respond to feedback.

·         Categories easily identifiable

·         Ability to search for a story without having to look through all categories.

Disadvantages of blogging are:

·         Not being able to reach the older generation

·         Restricted to reading off an electronic device.

·         Too much information, too quickly, hard to follow.

·         Relies on electricity, the digital world can come to a full shut down when one does not have electricity.

The future of blogging

To be quite honest, I haven’t really gotten used to blogging to begin with. When I first learned about blogging, I thought of it as a tool for self-made celebrities – a little like you-tube. It does seem that most have taken a liking to blogging and actually enjoy reading such news over blogs rather than a good old newspaper; but I can only speak from my own perspective and maybe even generalize a bit when it comes to my own age-group. I truly think that we will experience different platforms for sharing information and because of the abundance of information, I see there will be a large disconnect between people. If you think back, most would rely on the radio or the newspaper that would get dropped to their house every morning. Because this was the only few sources of information, most people would end up discussing similar topics. In this day and age, availability of information is so abundant that it is hard to relate to someone else unless you talk about the weather! J…Yes, this topic will always be widely discussed. In the next 5-10 years I expect blogging to continue to be widely used, but I do think that we are continuously waiting for “the next best thing”, which may change the way we blog.