blogger the 'citizen journalist'

As I've never wrote and read blogs I was interested who/why were writing blogs. I had a look at Stuart Allan's book Online News (2006) where he talked about the importance of blogging in online journalism nowadays. He studied the tsunami that devastated Indonesia in 2005. Stuart said that the journalist could just give 'one part of the story, and from a chosen perspective consistent with implicit judgements about access, news values, source credibility, and audience predisposition.' (2006, p.6)
And here comes the importance of the bloggers, some of them were eyewitness of the tsunami and could give a realistic and close coverage of the disaster. This is how the blogger become a 'citizen journalist'. (Stuart 2006)
I won't go that far with my blog..but I will write about my ideas and progress as this blog is a reflective, learning diary since it's one of the assignments for the Multimedia Project module

I find this class really interesting and something new as we don’t really have 'practical' projects like this. It also opens new topics in the media field such as identity online, virtual communities etc. that we talked about last week. I think this module is really challenging as it makes us think about everyday things (almost all of us is using, myspace, facebook etc) in a way we wouldn't have thought about them before: such as how these sites like myspace and facebook are creating 'virtual communities' and how people are sharing their personal information, pictures on the internet and putting on different identities.

I could also link the idea of 'information society', a topic that was mentioned on the New Technology/ New Cultures class, to this module. In this 'information society' the more optimistic view about the internet, high technology (internet connects people, work can be quicker, simpler through the internet and also the internet) clashes with the more pessimistic view that shows the negative side of this always renewing technology (suicide pages, paedophiles etc) and says that modernization is not necessarily good and we shouldn’t cross certain lines even if we have the power to do it.
Personally I don't know which view is the right one (if there is right one) and I hope this class will help me to develop a more complex and clearer view about these issues.
I found this class really interesting even though I am a little a bit scared because I am not really good with computers and we will also need to create a webpage as a group project. I am working together with Ioannis Sarah, Alisha and Miray and our theme will be identity online. I will write about how the group project goes a bit later because we just started to do some research and we are not really sure how and what we will do.