We live in a time where an individual's voice can be heard by many through the use of the internet. The two greatest platforms one can achieve a modern-day soap box are Wikis and Blogs.
Blogs are around twenty years old, and started almost as a grass-roots style of internet usage. As the article How can we Measure the Influence of the Blogospher by Kathy E. Gill,In the early 1990s, the Web promised active communities and social networks, sharing ideas and shaping new realities. Everyone who wished to be would be a publisher; democratization of information (and, consequently, power), would follow."(Gill) A blog enables the author to create posts ranging from how-to's to political opinions. It's mean to be a form of self-expression, a published document where other readers can view and often times submit a comment. Often times, dirt-sheets will utilize a blog to their advantage, giving up-to-date reports on celebrity's life off the silver screen. Out of the millions upon millions of blogs available on the internet, the top blog remains to be the Huffington Post which, to its credit, is often honored by mass media outlets as being a credible news source for information regarding not only Hollywood, but politics as well. It is, of course, followed by the today's answer for dirt-sheets, TMZ. (Which, contrary to what Jimmy Kimmel says, does not stand for The Mexican Zone) While these are huge-market blogs, anyone from anywhere on any budget can start a successful blog, as long as their content is valued enough.
Wikis, unlike blogs, are styled in such a way that many people can add, subtract, or contribute in a number of different ways to the original base content.Ezra Goodnoe describes wikis as,"In the corporate environment, wikis are best implemented behind a firewall for a wholly internal user base."(Goodnoe, How To Use Wikis for Business,2005).It's often used to arrange groups, plan events, and spread word amongst communities with the platform being opened up to one and all. The most popular wiki website is Wikileaks. Wikileaks is anarchy at its purist form and uses the digital media as a platform to fight corruption in all forms of government. It's most recent "leak"was about detainee policies and how the United States' military detention policies.
To see a list of the top blogs on the internet, go to
http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/blogs
To visit Wikileaks, go to
http://wikileaks.org/
Really funny parody of wikileaks on SNL:
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/wikileaks-cold-open/1263417/
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