I believe what helped bring about the age of “social media” is the ever popular blog. Blogging has become quite an essential tool in today’s highly technological and informational culture. Blogs come in different forms; there are blogs about everyday life, hobbies, jobs, and news. What we have to consider here is that blogs brings the control back to the user; the blogger has the freedom to write about anything he or she wants and post it immediately in real-time. Another factor that compels people to start blogs is that engages their readers, allowing them the ability to express their own opinions by posting comments. In fact, blogging has become so popular that companies from every industry have been implementing them into their websites for the sole purpose of supplying their clients and customers information pertaining to their services.

Blogging has become a form of social media journalism where information is gathered and blogged for the sole purpose to engage the reader. At first blogging was considered a hobby, kind of like an online diary or journal, now they are career positions and highly valued I might add. I happen to enjoy blogging for several, one thing is that I enjoy offering information about Hispanic culture and marketing because I love studying the topics and the other is that it will really help boost my notoriety as a professional on my resume when I graduate because it shows that I can research, write, and be creative at the same time. I happened to come across an article from an online newspaper called the Atlantic, that further reports the concept of blogging becoming a paid professional career. I managed to copy the article below. Let me know what you think.

Blogging goes professional

by Megan McArdle of the Atlantic
25 Apr 2008

I was at lunch with some blog people today, one of whom wants to recruit an economics blogger and asked for names. I basically drew a blank. All of the high-traffic economics bloggers I read are either professors, in some similarly rewarding profession, or already tied up by a media organization.

I think this is becoming broadly true of the wider blog world: the biggest bloggers are either professionals, or they have an even more lucrative job. I blogged the primary from Matt’s house on Tuesday, and almost everyone in the room were being paid to blog. Two years ago, we were all amateurs. That’s a skewed sample, of course, but all of us had relatively widely read blogs not only before we took a salary, but before we knew each other. I don’t mean to say that there are no high trafficked policy blogs not run by professors or professionals, since this is clearly not true. But the numbers seem to be dwindling. And most of the obvious people of whom I would have said to any media organization “You should hire this blogger” seem to have been hired. I expect the rest to follow soon, since there are fewer arbitrage opportunities. There’s a lot more amateur talent remaining in other fields, like science blogging, but I wonder how long this will last.

I’m not sure what this means for the blogging world. It’s still largely an amateur medium, but it’s hard to see how many new bloggers can compete with someone who gets paid to do it, unless they are independently wealthy or have a job, like journalism or academia, that routinely throws them a lot of bloggable material. Will it become as hard to break into blogging as it is to break into print?

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