What is a blog exactly? I mean, beyond the fact that “blog” is short for “web log.” What constitutes a blog and did they exist in any other form prior to the world wide web? Are there any set rules restricting blog format and what they cover? Should there be?
My first encounter with the term “blog” was in the fall of 2006 when my daughter was a grad student at UC Berkeley, CA. At the time I lived in Rome, New York. We didn’t get to speak to each other as much as we used to, so when we did our conversations were pretty long. One night she said to me, “Dad, it’s getting late and I still have to post my blog before I go to bed.”
I was intrigued and asked her what that was. She let me know that it was sort of an anonymous diary posted online, a place where other readers can give their opinions about your feelings and decisions that you’ve made or are about to make based on their experience. That left me thinking that blogs were for anonymously airing your feelings and getting public feedback.
The big benefit of this would be that those opinions could help a blogger (or reader) to get clarity on a situation… although several differences of opinions may not always make matters clear.
If blogs are nothing but sharing opinions and advice, then I quote Shakespeare’s SONNET 59 :
And Ecclesiastes 1:9:
That which has been is what will be,
That which is done is what will be done,
And there is nothing new under the sun.
Blogs are open to any and every subject imaginable – and seem to be just the most recent, modern-age development in the world of sharing advice through reading and writing. But there is one area in which I think they can be very helpful: in filmmaking.
Filmmakers can both entertain and build an audience through use of a blog. Particularly blogs where people interested in film can share their ups and downs in life – and on the set. (Misery loves company, especially when it can commiserate with super stars from the big screen!) Moreover, few crafts are as complicated as all of the many crafts that add up to a good film. Having blogs with advice to guide filmmakers as they learn is invaluable.
What do you think about blogs?
By Digital Film Academy Student Blogger Leon Scrubb
