Mostafa Mahmoudi - Bloggers & Journalist

Mostafa Mahmoudi
1081107434
amooshelby@gmail.com

Are bloggers journalists? If you’re a blogger and you engage in journalism in your blog, then you’re a journalist. This is how, at least, it is seen with this bill introduced by Representative Rick Boucher .

The Free Flow of Information Act protects journalists from divulging their sources for news stories except in cases where there is imminent harm to national security, imminent death or significant bodily harm involved, a trade secret of significant value in violation of State or Federal law, individually identifiable health information, and in instances where nondisclosure of the information would be contrary to the public interest.

In defining journalism broadly, the bill states: “The act would apply to web logs (‘blogs’) that engage in journalism.” It also clarifies that journalism refers to the tasks of “gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.”

Mostafa Mahoudi - what is social media

Name: Mostafa mahmoudi

Email: amooshelby@gmail.com

Student ID: 1081107434

watch this video first from youtube

I was searching through the internet today and came across an interesting post from Brian Clark, titled Since When Are Blogs Not Social Media?. Here is a quote from it:

I’ve noticed a strange trend lately.

For some reason, people seem to be equating social media with social networking.

At the same time, they seem to be treating blogging as something other than social media.

I found his post interesting because that trend is something I have been noticing myself. It looks like for many people social media is the collection of social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

Well, it is much more than that.

Social media are the various forms of user generated content and the collection of websites and applications that enables people to interact and share information online.

Complicated? Well here is a list of things that are part of the social media:

• online forums (e.g., DigitalPoint)
• blogs (e.g., WordPress)
• social networking sites (e.g., Facebook)
• social bookmarking sites (e.g., Digg)
• video sharing sites (e.g., YouTube)
• photo sharing sites (e.g. Flickr)
• streaming sites (e.g., Ustream)
• user reviews (e.g., Amazon)
• crowdsourcing (e.g., Wikipedia)
• content aggregators (e.g., FriendFeed)

As you can see, social media is much wider than what some people think. It is also much older. We could say that the first Usenet (a form of distributed discussion system) developed in 1980 was already social media.


MOstafa mahmoudi
1081107434