Dear Diary…

Dear diary, forgive me for what I will write. I wanted to say "hello" and "goodbye" to you for the last time. We have been together for years, I have always written my troubles, joy, excitement and boredom to you. But enough is enough!

Dear diary, you know I have been writing to you for years. But how long is summer summer? I stopped writing anymore. Writing was not enough for me. What I want is something different. I want text, picture, image, sound to have everything together. Just writing is not enough for me anymore.

But don't worry… You are not the reason why I gave up on you. Life has changed!

I remember the day we met. I chose you in the stationery because you have the strongest lock so that nobody can read what I wrote. As soon as I finished what I wrote every night, I would lock you tightly and put you in my secret place. Writing on his pages was a way of expressing myself. I wanted nobody to see it.

Then one day the internet entered my life. I came across people's articles on sites along with the Internet. They were telling about themselves. Some of them were articles that would translate my feelings. They were delivering their stories similar to my troubles and joys, which I kept on locked pages, to millions of people over the internet. Others shared their experiences in guiding others in their areas of expertise. I noticed that some of those who posted on the Internet had a serious fan base. I want to be famous too, I decided to be like one of them. “From now on, I will write my articles on the internet and keep my diary on the internet. Like them, I will be famous for 15 minutes, ”I said. I started researching how I could do it. I learned that the pages on the Internet where people mainly keep their diaries are called “blogs”.

Dear diary, blogs have been widely used all over the world since 1999. As of May 2005, the blog world, called the Blogosphere, has expanded so much today that there are even search engines that specifically search for blogs. According to the statistics of Technorati, one of the sites that keep the pulse of the blogosphere, more than 50 thousand new blog sites are created daily. 60 percent of blog readers are men, and 73 percent of those who read blogs have had an internet connection for more than five years.

Blogs are not enough either

After discovering blogs, I continued to share with people by writing on blogs for a while. Writing on blogs is a way to express yourself. In addition, an interaction is possible thanks to the comments of the blog visitors. Thanks to the ability to add pictures, sound and videos in addition to the article, I also had the chance to explain what I wanted to tell more easily. I had the chance to share the videos, pictures that interest me or images that support what I have told with users. After a while, I realized that I was bored reading blogs written by others. It could be boring to read about 1-1.5 pages long articles. Sometimes I was lazy about the length of the article and I never read it. I noticed that visitors have the same feelings on my blog that I wrote. I discovered podcasting while looking for a more practical way to keep a journal on the Internet. Speaking was enough instead of writing in the podcasting system. I started recording my conversations via any tape recorder, uploading them to my blog and sharing them with the world. I started keeping my diary out loud and listening to the audio diaries. I also had the advantage of taking the voice recording to my mp3 player and listening to it wherever I wanted. However, podcast is widely used especially in the USA and Europe. A practical way beyond both writing and recording; video blog.

Watch me

The blogosphere has grown so large that it has become impossible to keep up with all of them. With the development of technology, more bloggers and more content emerged. The number of blogs I follow has increased. Just reading what was written when I followed it started to take quite a bit of time. At this point, the video came to the aid of bloggers. Video is not a new technology, but the infrastructure required for video to find its place efficiently on the internet has recently developed. With the availability of video upload-creation software and internet bandwidth, it has become much easier to upload, watch and send videos on the internet compared to the past. Video sharing sites like YouTube have had a great impact on the spread of the video. Users started to share their videos with the whole world. After a while, videos started to take the place of post in blogs. It has become much more practical for both the narrator and the viewer to tell by video instead of writing. Eventually, the concept of video journaling developed and "video bloggers" began to take their place in the blogosphere.

Video diary is called "video blog, vblog, vlog". The number of users who keep a diary with the video called vlogger is increasing day by day. Vlogs bring important advantages as they allow the merging of image, sound and text.

Vblogs provide the opportunity to be recognized by millions of people. It helps the person to share important events that have happened around him. There is no need to write paragraphs and write down on paper at length. It is enough to show. Users visiting the vlogs can get more information in a shorter time than the article. Emotions can be expressed more easily with gestures and intonations in the voice.

Video blogs also serve as news centers, since the ability to record and publish images is much easier than in the past. Vloggers, who carry a recording device with them at any time, can share every image they find "noteworthy" with the world in their vlogs. Sometimes they can even be faster than press organizations. Vloggers, who describe themselves as "citizen journalists," caught the attention of media outlets such as the BBC with their images during the 2004 tsunami disaster and Hurricane Katrina that hit the US. Vloggers appeal to a large audience in normal life as well as their success in natural disasters. Vlogs, which have the potential to provide financial gain to their broadcasters, draw attention in the field of personal television broadcasting. From the moment you start to keep a video blog, in a sense, you also have your own television channel. Rocketboom site, one of the important representatives of the vlog world, attracts great attention with its visitor statistics exceeding one hundred thousand people a day.

Beyond vlogs ...

Dear diary, we started with the article, continued with the voice. Soon video diaries arrived, combining audio, picture and video. Today, a new log concept called "Live Log" is preparing to take hold of the virtual world. It can be called the live version of the video logs. We can instantly broadcast everything we do during the day on the internet via wireless cameras. Users who mount a camera on their head or shoulder instantly share every step they take with the world. They share how their lives looked and lived with the world from their own eye level.

In the face of all this development and change of dear everyday technology, I still cannot keep a diary on locked pages. Try to understand me. Dear diary, goodbye ....!