Using and Evaluating a News 2.0 Tool

The tool I used most for the project was the blogs. Blogs are basically just a website where an individual or maybe several individuals write his/her/their oppinions on certain events that are relevant to them and to their audience. Blogs are usually mostly writing but they can also have pictures and videos and links and music other interesting features. Blogs are a more interactive way to put out news because they allow the audience to comment back on the content and the blogger can probably comment back to them. It's more interactive than a newspaper or the television machine because it's more like a conversation or debate over events rather than just a report of what happened. There are also blogs where the blogger makes it more of a blog about personal events that are happening in their own life.
I used the tool to report on the Girls Volleyball Provincials that our school hosted. The content I included was usually textual but I also used pictures sometimes to try and make the best representation of the tournament to my audience, other than actually being there because the man purpose of the blog was to inform parents and relatives who were unable to attend on the events.
This tool would have been quite a useful tool to use for the major project had we decided to run it that way. Instead we chose to do a talk show about drug and alcohol abuse. However I think a blog about drug and alcohol abuse would've worked just as well. Some possibilities for this idea are that we could have created our own blog and each wrote a couple of blog entries about the effects that drug and alcohol abuse might have had on our lives.
The pros of this tool are that it is a much more interactive way to get news out and for everyone to have their own oppinion on it. An example of this is the CBC website right now. If you create an account on their website you are able to comment on all of their stories and videos and have discussions with other users of the site. This feature is useful to the reporters because then they know what their audience thinks of their stories. I can't think of any cons to blogs at the moment.
By B.L.