It is a well-known fact that information rules the world and one of the ways of getting it is communication. Over the last century the contacts between countries have become closer and the significance of international communication is getting increasingly vivid. All you need for cross-cultural communication is the knowledge of a foreign language and computer skills. The Internet is generally agreed to be one of the fastest and easiest ways of receiving and exchanging information which is now available almost for everybody. The aim of this article is to give an outline of a new phenomenon in the sphere of cross-cultural communication introduced by the Internet which is soaring popularity in Russia. It’s blogging.

So, what is actually a blog? In brief, you can say that it’s a personal online journal. But traditionally journals were private and were supposed only for some secret affaires, nobody could read them. Blogs, on the contrary, are open to the public and everybody can not only read them but even post his/her comments on what the author is writing about. Another feature is that all posts are displayed in a reverse chronological order with the most recent information on its top. This is very convenient because you are always faced with the latest updates [1].

As to the origin of the word ‘blog’, I find it very interesting to know. First, some facts.

The term ‘weblog’ was coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The short form ‘blog’ was coined by Peter Merholz who jokingly broke the word ‘weblog’ into the phrase ‘we blog’. Today we use ‘blog’ as a noun which means ‘someone’s journal’ and as a verb: ‘to blog’ means ‘to post to someone’s blog’ [2].

The timeline below illustrates some of the most important events in the development of blogging.

The first blog appeared in 1994 and was started by his owner Justin Hall, who is considered to have been the first blogger. Since that time blogs developed very slowly because it was difficult to create and run a blog and it was available only for professional programmers. But after some popular blog services appeared in 1999 they began to gain in popularity very rapidly: now it was easy to start a blog, even an amateur could do it. In 2004 blogs became the ‘mainstream’: many journalists, politicians, writers started their own blogs which made blogs even more popular. Now blogs have introduced an alternative network that can be used as a new source of information [3].

Of course, blogs are different in style, topics and their content but technically all of them are similar. A blog means a web page to which its owner regularly adds new entries, or ‘posts’, which contain:

* The links, which are necessary for binding different blogs and other resourses of information
* The time stamp – without it your readers would not be able to know when the update was posted exactly
* The permalink – is the link to the permanent location of the post in the blog’s archive, so no post can be lost or inaccessible [4].

Almost all blogs are structured in this way that makes them very simple to use.

Blogs are conducted in different languages but we are most interested in English and Russian. We often like to compare Russian and American cultures and people. This difference has marked even the way we blog. As an example, I’d like to represent some quotations from an interview with Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of a popular blog service livejournal.com., which he gave to the Russian press. When asked about the difference between Russian and American blogs, Fitzpatrick said that nobody from American users can brag about hundreds of people, reading his diary. These are always small groups of friends, or even a family way of dialogue, for example, if the owner of the blog lives in another city. But the Russian blog sphere works as mass-media and only in Russia cinema and pop stars, journalists and politicians can start a blog and actively update it. Brad Fitzpatrick claims that even the word ‘friend’ is understood differently. For American bloggers it still means a friend, a close person, but for Russian bloggers a ‘friend’ means just a reader, someone who reads your journal [5].

As a conclusion I’d like to outline some advantages of blogging.

First of all, it’s a free communication which gives us an opportunity to find new friends all over the world, join the online communities according to your interests, participate in different discussions and exchange all kinds of information.

But blogging is not only for fun. It can be used for work and studying. What is more important for students and all language learners, blogs offer a perfect opportunity to enlarge your vocabulary while reading posts, writing and discussing some affairs. You can also improve your ability of searching, reading and understanding information in a foreign language. Also you will learn to consolidate grammatical structures and some informal phrases through context which can be very useful for everyday communication.

If some day you decide to start your own blog, you are welcome to choose one of the most popular Russian or foreign blog services:

Russian:

* Liveinternet.ru
* Blogs.mail.ru
* Dairy.ru

Foreign:

* Livejournal.com
* Blogger.com
* MySpace.com

Литература

1. O’Reilly Network. What We’re Doing When We Blog http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/06/13/megnut.html
2. Blog – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog
3. Blogs: History. http://www2.bc.edu/~wessonj/History.htm
4. Rebecca Blood. Weblogs: A History And Perspective http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
5. А. Сергеев, «Хроники виртуальной жизни» // Журнал «Вокруг света» – М: Изд-во «Вокруг света», 2007. – № 1 – С.161-162.

Научный руководитель – Ястребова Л.Н.,
ст. преподаватель ИЯК ТПУ