Yesterday I was explaining what a blog is and how the technology opened up internet publishing to the common man.

The perfect example of how this changed the internet in 2004 could be seen in politics.

In years past, politicians had static websites that would have been created by someone on their campaign staff. The websites would discuss the candidate’s political views and beliefs. However, much of the content would be created, published and go unchanged throughout the course of the campaign. If a voter wanted to know more about a candidate, odds are they visited the site once, read it and moved on.

In 2004, blogging software allowed politicians to publish their own website without the use of a campaign staffer.

For example, a candidate who had just finished a speech might hop onto a bus and write a quick journal entry about the crowds’ response or someone whom they met that had a touching story while driving to the next campaign stop.

As a potential voter wanting to know more about the candidates, not only could you read comments written directly by the candidate, but the website might get updated dozens of times a day (giving you a reason to come back and follow the candidate closely). This helped candidates make a personal connection with their voters and raise money from people who otherwise wouldn’t have made donations.

At the same time, there were average citizens who promoted themselves to the position of journalist in order to open up discussions of news stories that failed to get a lot of national attention by the mainstream media.

Whereas the cost of television time and newspaper publishing would generally force a fringe political story to die in the mainstream media, bloggers with good writing skills and a desire to push their own political agenda could keep the stories alive with readers on the internet for months. Amazingly, once enough bloggers wrote enough blog articles, we saw many of these stories began to creep back into mainstream media- for and against candidates of both parties.

Suddenly the world was a journalist. The cost of “publishing” was reduced to owning a computer with internet access and having the desire to say something.

Of course making internet publishing this easy had ramification. Obviously, having a desire to say something and the ability to say it doesn’t mean you should post it for the whole world to read.

That article I referenced yesterday in Time Magazine discussed a Delta Airline attendant who decided to post provocative photos of herself in uniform on a plane. Apparently she desired to be viewed as a sex symbol; instead she got fired.

In 2005, it seemed every month brought a different news story about some idiot who developed foot in mouth disease- publishing their gripes about their workplace to the internet for the whole world to read and then acting surprised when their bosses read it and fired them as a result.

My favorite was the rookie St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper reporter who suddenly found his personal blog ripping on the paper’s management reprinted in a rival newspaper!

Now despite the downside and the fact that others said blogging was a “fad,” it has continued.

In St. Louis, where I live, there is a repository for local blogs called stlbloggers.com. It lists hundreds of area blogs.

Some blogs have themes- talking about local sporting teams, politics, personal hobbies, clubs or social ills. Others are just a collection of ramblings by someone with a desire to write. Some are written well enough to get bloggers published as columnists in the local newspaper, others leave you scratching your head.

Then there is the commercial application for blogs…

(Ah, the Cliff-Hanger!  Read More Tomorrow!)