如何看待“博客”现象?（用英语回答）

如何看待“博客”现象?（用英语回答）

Blog phenomenon all around By Jim PintoThese days, a new phenomenon is transforming politics, business, and society—Web logs, or "blogs", for short.These millions of online journals, published almost instantly, link together into a vast network of individuals and businesses, hobbyists, cranks, and political mobs. There are plenty out there that are good and plenty that are bad: the politics of left, right, and extreme; business complaints and kudos; stock-market tips and rumors; individual sincerity; and self-obsession.According to Business Week and others, Web logs are the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. Blogs are shaking up just about every business. In this period of accelerating change, blogs are not a business elective anymore, they are a prerequisite.There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Many blogs include links, or underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers to other Web pages. The interesting thing about blogs is one doesn’t have to wait for weeks, or even days, to get published; most blogs appear right away, typically within less than an hour, depending on whether they are monitored or not. It’s an interesting experience, getting comments about news stories, within hours, and sometimes even minutes, after the story breaks.My Web site has had blogs for a couple of years, generating a lot of traffic and commentary. These relate to all topics covered in InTech News’ Pinto’s Points and other writings. Note: These are not "open" blogs, or chat-boards, where people's comments automatically go online. (Yahoo! and others handle that well.) Instead, we try to calibrate the input. When it is company-related, we try to make sure the bloggers are not simply disgruntled employees sounding off. All blogs undergo review and sometimes get edited (removing overly negative material and stuff that simply looks like rumors). The message goes online within a couple of hours, or at most the same day.Why does JimPinto.com do these blogs? We have had quite a few requests. Apparently, some people often don't have any other way to communicate within their own company. It's evident that senior management in all the automation companies read these blogs regularly. We’ve invited senior people to Web log comments, and sometimes that happens. Some of these blogs have regularly been attracting more than 1,000 visits per day, and when something controversial comes along, the visits shoot up to many times that number.