No Way Out

The blogosphere keeps expanding at an alarming rate. What this means to individuals, businesses and politicians can only be guessed at. Now, that everyone has a publishig tool and a ready audience, spreading the word good or bad about someone, company or a bad experience is just a matter of willingness.

I'm just wondering wether our Zambian society or more precisely our political environment can tolerate or even cope with such fiercely advanced and independent form of communication. Of course, it's difficult to take the phenomenon seriously when most blogs involve kids talking about their dates, people posting pictures of their cats, or lefties raging about the right (and vice versa). But whatever the topic, the discussion of business isn't usually too far behind: from bad experiences with a product to good customer service somewhere else. Suddenly everyone's a publisher and everyone's a critic

The Fortune magazine technology article titledWhy There's No Escaping the Blog puts it this way:

"It all used to be so easy; the adage went 'never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.' But now everyone can get ink for free, launch a diatribe, and-if what they have to say is interesting to enough people-expect web-enabled word of mouth to carry it around the world. Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing. A big reason for that is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog. Instead of linking to web pages, which can change, bloggers link to one another's posts, which typically remain accessible indefinitely. This style of linking also gives blogs a viral quality, so a pertinent post can gain broad attention amazingly fast-and reputations can get taken down just as quickly. "