Website Analysis 7 - Blogs

The link to most of the blogs is http://skynews9.typepad.com/
This one - http://skynews9.typepad.com/my_blog/2008/02/quake-uk---your.html - refers to Tuesday night’s earthquake…which I’m sure we all remember! We can see it has sparked a lot of interest as it is something people want to talk about and share their experiences of. Something like this I guess creates a sense of ‘community’ as it is an experience shared by most of the people who have contributed their thoughts. I think for something to be a community there must be a shared something….shared location, experience, values, etc. I think on the blogs on Sky News in general there isn’t really a sense of an online community but in each individual blog where the discussion has really kicked off, there is more of a sense of community and togetherness. Did anyone else read any and did anyone else find this?
I also found an interesting blog considering we’re talking about new media, the post only has one comment which isn’t very good, but I though it was relevant to this unit. The link is - http://skynews9.typepad.com/my_blog/2008/02/farewell-to-the.html and it is supposed to be discussing ‘the end of an era’ of how we don’t use Polaroids anymore. To us this could be classified as an ‘old media’ and out digital cameras are the ‘new media’. But are they? Or are they ‘new’ or just a development of the ‘old’ forms?
These blogs also include ‘House Rules’ - http://skynews9.typepad.com/my_blog/2007/04/house_rules.html#comments – which tell the users that comments will be moderated before they are posted. I believe this would eliminate any chances of ‘flaming’. I think it would look bad for a company such as Sky News to have people ‘flaming’ eachother as it doesn’t look very professional and decreases it’s academic credibility.