Humans crave community, the sense of belonging that comes from associating with others. Online blogs and podcasting have allowed people to create and belong to communities around the world. But the development also raises the interesting question of who has a right to the microphone of public opinion.
The popularity of blogs, or web diaries, has boomed in the past year. About a quarter of US internet users say they read them. To put that into perspective, the number of people who read blogs is almost half the size of the entire US talk-radio audience and about a quarter the number of those who ready daily papers.
And that's just the US.
Blogs are a global revolution with a previously undreamt of audience reach. And they are growing.
The incredible popularity of blogs has surprised onlookers and caused concern among the traditional purveyors of comment and opinion in the mainstream media. Never before have individuals had access to a potential global audience for their private thoughts.
During the Iraq war, many people around the world who were tuning in to updates from reporters on the frontlines were also reading daily blogs from a local calling himself Salaam Pax, writing during the assault on Baghdad. These blogs by the Iraqi architecture student provided an insider's account into what was happening on the ground, and an interesting counterpoint to the official dispatches.
Blog audiences are wide and diverse, interested in everything from rock music to religion. Blogs tend to consist of short entries posted on a whim, and recently they have have been joined by those created using a mobile phone (moblogs), and those with video (vlogs) and audio (podcasting).
Sociologist Elizabeth Eddy, of the University of the Sunshine Coast, says people value online communities because they provide a sense of purpose and belonging.
"These may have a geographical basis, but they may also involve formal or informal groupings based on hobbies or sports or political affiliations," she says.
Wright Bryan, a producer of America's National Public Radio website, believes blogs represent freedom to writers, offering them a new frontier.
"At its best, a blog is a form of personal journalism that opens the public up to a whole new role in the news business," he says. "People use it to experiment with form, content and language. It is the antithesis of a large news organisation."
Mr Bryan described blogs as the human voice and imagination amplified by the power of the web.
"War, politics and pop culture are all obsessed over and reported on by bloggers," he says. "You name a topic and someone, somewhere, probably has a blog about it."
The blogs to watch, Mr Bryan says, are the ones that appear where news is happening.
"Whether it's revolution in one of the former Soviet republics or war in Iraq, someone with a front-row seat is blogging about it," he says.
Mr Bryan says these blogs give unfiltered news to a global audience. "This is the public taking over where the professional journalist can't, or won't, go."
Traditionally, only people with a public profile or those with specialist knowledge would be offered the public microphone. But blogs have changed all that.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that even journalists are turning to writing blogs, both for their news organisations - and for themselves.
Dan Gillmor, a former columnist with the San Jose Mercury News in California, who last year published We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People, says reporters do not have a monopoly on knowledge.
"Every reporter should realise that, collectively, the readers know more than they do about what they write on," he says.
In some respects, podcasts are the offspring of blogs. Rather than type their thoughts, bloggers save home-made radio shows to their computers and audiences listen on portable media players. The term comes from the Apple product that plays MP3 music files, the iPod. But despite the name, podcasts can be played on any device with MP3 player software, including PCs and notebooks.
It's a development that mainstream media is taking seriously. In recent weeks, US newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Philadelphia Daily News, Denver Post and Forbes have all started podcasts.
Industry is also sitting up and taking notice of the podcast and its ability to reach wide audiences. Volvo plans to spend about $80,000 to sponsor autoblog.com for six months and is underwriting the launch of the autoblog podcast.
And record companies are using podcasts to attract music fans. "We think podcasts are a great way to form a relationship with fans," says Damian Kulash, lead singer of the US band OK Go, whose website offers podcasts of radio interviews and blogs from band members and fans.
Even the church is getting on board. The Catholic Insider website offers "podcasting from the heart of the Catholic church", complete with links to podcasts of Pope Benedict XVI from Vatican Radio.
And Australia's Radio National has just completed a month-long podcasting trial. The station's podcasting manager, Gordon Taylor, says more than 4000 people completed an online survey.
"That is amazing for something that didn't even exist a year ago," he says.
It's hard to believe that web diaries created on home computers could have media heavyweights worried, but in April media entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch warned the annual meeting of America's society of newspaper editors that unless they woke up to the changes that the internet was presenting, the newspaper industry would be "relegated to the status of also-rans".
Blogs and podcasting have led to the rise of what has become known as community journalism.
The concept was pioneered in South Korea, where OhMyNews began in 2002. The website says it has 37,000 contributors posting up to 200 stories a day.
The publisher of The Bakersfield Californian newspaper launched a reader-written website last May.
A year after its launch, almost 500 people had contributed articles or photographs.
The company also publishes the best of its website every fortnight, delivering a newspaper version to each household in the area.
Publisher Mary Lou Fulton says they are turning traditional journalism on its head.
"Instead of being the gatekeeper - telling people that what's important to them is not news - we're just opening up the gates and letting people come on in," she says.
"We are a better community newspaper for having thousands of readers who serve as the eyes and ears for the voice rather than having everything filtered through the views of a small group of reporters and editors."
GetLocalNews.com, a network of 6000 local news sites in the US, is about to start paying its thousands of volunteer writers. The company publishes about 4000 stories a day.
Edgar Canon, chief executive of the San Francisco company, says it will pay writers based on how much traffic their stories generate.
But not everyone is convinced of the value of community journalism.
Gary Bostwick, a Los Angeles-based lawyer whose firm defends media companies in defamation cases, believes the concept is "fraught with dangers".
MSNBC.com, a joint venture of NBC News and Microsoft, recently introduced a community journalism page. But executive editor Tom Brew concedes that the difficulty of confirming facts in the stories that are submitted is "a real concern".
"We don't want people trying to pull a hoax on us," he says, adding that the site checks each story for accuracy.
Last November, the Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland offered $US1.3 million ($A1.6 million) to fund 20 "micro-local" websites around the US. All of the grants announced earlier this month went to non-profit groups creating community news sites.
The institute's executive director, Jan Schaffer, believes bloggers are a new kind of guerrilla journalist and says many bloggers believe they are being ignored by mainstream media.
Sociologist Phillip Ablett, from the University of the Sunshine Coast, agrees. "Nowhere is this more evident than in the creation of internet subcultures or communities," he says.
Dr Ablett believes the rise of the blog is evidence of a growing dissatisfaction by the public who are turning to the internet as a response to what they see as a corporate-dominated public sphere in which they have no voice.
An entry from the blog of freelance journalist Kevin Sites
Iraq, Monday, September 27, 2004 7:15 AM
Didn't want this site to be about what I had for breakfast, what books I'm reading, what music I like. I didn't want it to be blog smog - information haze - that's little more than a personal masthead for the ship of self.
When the site's producer, Xeni Jardin, coaxed me into the blogosphere while I was covering the invasion of Iraq for CNN, I thought it would be a great way to share, with anyone interested, what I'm seeing and experiencing in conflict zones around the world.
Obviously, it's the prism of my own sensibilities - but hopefully, a few filters less, a bit more direct. News stories without the middle-man. Plus I wanted it to be much more about people-somehow providing evidence of the connections we have to each other regardless of how geographically, linguistically or culturally removed. Finally, I wanted it to be about the small things - observations and conversations that might pass without fanfare that are actually divining rods to quiet truths.