Different uses of blogging

Blogging has proved to be an effective tool for a variety of purposes such as broadcasting of news, connecting with other people, direct marketing and so on. Though blogging was started by Internet users to keep online diaries, it became popular for other uses such as journalism, news broadcasting, political commentary and Internet marketing later on. Apart from such professional uses, blogging is also popular as a hobby and for keeping in touch with friends.

Some of such uses of blogging are discussed here:

• Leisure: Many individuals use it leisure purposes. They tend to blog as a hobby without any focus on reaping any type of benefit from their blogs. It is common to see bloggers posting their photographs on their blogs or using their blogs to keep in touch with their friends.
• Journalism: Blogging is considered as a tool to skip the filter of censorship while broadcasting news. Bloggers broadcast news directly to the audience as and when any event takes place. This has irked many critics who think that bloggers don't respect copyrights. Besides that, it is felt that they tend to ignore responsibility of mass media while presenting plausible news. In fact, the role of bloggers in broadcasting news about various events prompted noted magazine Time to declare 'You' as person of the year in 2006.
• Political propaganda: Blogging has been put to purpose of contacting voters by politicians across the globe. Its impact on US presidential elections of 2008 was tremendous when blogosphere had become a new battleground for Republicans and Democrats. Blogs are used by political parties to reach out to people and to broadcast news about them, their policies and their important placeholders. This is an easy way of communicating with them as it reduces need of door to door campaigning.
• Collection of customer feedback: These days, major organizations set up their own blogs so as to reach out to their customers and collect their feedback or comments about their experiences with them. Blogs may also be used to broadcast news about new policies, products or services that might be launched in near future. Though blogging has been a boon for certain organizations such as Dell, it backfired for others such as Nestle which failed to keep a tab on their customers' pulse.
• Organizations like Dell, Starbucks and Old Spice were able to gauge public feedback about their products and services with their blogs. In this way, these companies were able to weed out negative feedback. Similar attempts made by corporations like Nestle backfired after these organizations failed to reply in a positive manner to the feedback given to them by their customers.
• Commercial purposes: Numerous people set up their blogs so as to advertise their products or services to Internet users. Besides that, a number of them start blogging only to attract pay per click advertisement programs so as to earn advertisement or affiliation based advertisement revenue. These money making bloggers are quite popular. Blogs set up by such bloggers may have good quality information about other products such as reviews of electronic equipment.