Published: Saturday, March 7, 2009 in The Whitworthian.

If there’s one distinguishing feature that will be remembered about the birth of the digital age, it will be the explosion of social networking. Sites like Facebook and MySpace have millions of subscribers, but a decade or two ago no one had even conceptualized them. One of the more interesting concepts that has been born out of all this is blogging.

Born in the early 90s, the word ‘blog’ is a contraction of ‘weblog’, and at its core is a website that is regularly updated with individual entries. Though it is used in many venues, perhaps the most popular is personal publication.

Self-publication isn’t a new phenomenon, but blogging offers anyone with a computer an opportunity to put their words in front of everyone else with a computer. Sites like Blogger and WordPress offer people an easy to use set of tools with which they can do anything from keeping an online diary to maintaining a news feed to publishing fiction.

Anyone can, and everyone should, maintain a blog, especially if you have any interest in writing or a career in communications. Maintaining a blog will force you to practice your writing skills and it can also be a useful portfolio piece for a potential employer. Writing is a skill that nearly every profession demands, so it is well worth your while to give that skill a workout in a public format like blogging.

And if you haven’t already noticed, Whitworth is home to a rather fine bunch of writers. Some of them work for this newspaper, and so you get to bask in their typographical excellence. Others, however, do not – but that, of course, doesn’t mean they haven’t written anything worth reading.

I would be willing to bet that most Whitworth students know at least one person who maintains a blog. I would also be willing to bet that only a very small percentage of students ever actually read other people’s blogs. This is a tragedy.

Blogs are a fantastic way to keep people updated on how things are going, to tell crazy stories or to share that collection of poetry with your friends. But if you never take the time to read that blog your friend keeps telling you about, you’ll be missing out. People often find it easier to write out feelings or thoughts on a subject than to vocalize them. Reading a friend’s blog can often reveal a side of them you never knew existed, and open the door to a more meaningful relationship.

whitworthian.com maintains several blogs that are well worth reading. These blogs give information about ASWU meetings, campus construction, security alerts and more. All of them are quite informative and will give you the inside scoop on what’s going on around campus – and all of them are criminally underread.

The Whitworthian.com also includes links to student blogs. At the time of this writing, there are only two lonely blogs in the student section, one of which may or may not be my own… if you’re into gaming, give it a look. The Whitworth Forum is also linked. Anyone with even a passing interest in open-minded debate should definitely check out this blog maintained by Whitworth students and alumni that serves as a forum to discuss Whitworth-related issues.

The shameless plug for this article, for those of you who only read the first and last paragraphs of things, is that you should check out the blogs hosted on whitworthian.com. They’ll keep you informed, entertained and even intellectually challenged. The public service announcement for the article: dive into blogging! Go read the one your friends keep telling you about, and maybe even start your own.