http://www.blogging.kz/ is a kazakhstanic web source that gathers blogs of different people. It contains plenty of information concerning politics, economics, entertainment, social events, culture, literature, sport and many others. The posts are written by professional journalists and people who don’t have deep knowledge and skills in journalism and mass media, but who have useful information and want to share it with other bloggers.
This site is a perfect example of a participatory journalism via internet because here people have an opportunity to interchange the information. Some of them collaborate with each other, commenting posts, asking and giving recommendations. It is not mandatory to be a professional journalist in order to make a post. If you have a few words to say, do it. Everyone has equal opportunity to publish a post. Blogging.kz doesn’t have restrictions and limitations about what to write. Anything you are interested in can be written on the site.
For today blogging.kz has 33 blogs and 3989 posts and these amounts are constantly rising. It reflects the understanding of convenience and importance of online participatory journalism among people. It saves time and efforts in comparison with traditional print, TV or radio journalism. People not just users but participants, and that encourages them to write their selves.
Everyday site is refreshing and new posts are added. Site has very convenient structure: all posts are divided and categorized according to chronological order and subjects, so that you can quickly and easily find needed information.
However, it has shortcomings as well. Since there is no restrictions and nobody revises posts they may contain unreliable facts. Also there are many “junk” posts, that can not be useful. Furthermore, In a certain degree it does not completely correspond to definition of a source of online participatory journalism because some people do not understand the main meaning. They use the site in other ways such as seeking people, I think there are a lot of other sites specially earmarked for this purpose.
Online prticipatory journalism is a child of technological progress. It is unique achievemnet in mass media and it is wonderful that it’s taking place in Kazakhstan also through blogging.kz and others.
