silence of the bloggers

I found myself looking through the directory of classmate’s blogs to try to find a topic for this post and the more and more I looked the more I was surprised that people had made themselves private.  Correct me if I’m wrong but I used to think that the point of a blog was to try to get your point across to any pair of eyes that would be willing to sit and put in the effort to read your opinion.  Finally I came upon a familiar name, Gabriela Roestandy, a group member of mine whose blog was not private.  Step one complete!  Going through her blogs I was pleasantly surprised when I found an article of hers that seemed to relate to the concerns I was having early about all these private blogs.

Gabriela’s Blogpost: The Effectiveness of Word of Mouth
https://blogs.ubc.ca/gabyroestandy/2011/11/25/the-effectiveness-of-word-of-mouth-marketing/

In her article she talks about how in this day and age where marketing is more and more centralized around the internet and social media, there’s still compelling evidence to show that word of mouth still has a significant impact on how people consume.  Now in my opinion these forms of communication are not mutually exclusive.  I think social media, in this case specifically blogs, is the digital rendering of word of mouth.  When you put the kind of effort that goes into writing a blog it’s usually because you’re passionate enough to write about it. Privatizing your blogs is silencing your own opinion and that passion, which is unfortunate because there’s a lot to be gained from a variety of opinions being available on a multitude of topics. The reason why message boards like reddit are so popular is it allows this digital word of mouth to be spread anonymously, but even then we see how powerful even this is.