Blogging, the newest Internet craze, reveals all the Internet is cracked up to be and more. Or is it less? Not familiar with the term “blog”? Short for “weblog,” it is an online diary where a person can confess his or her deepest and darkest secrets, among other things. The only problem is that his or her deepest and darkest secrets are also available to the rest of the world to read and comment on.

There are many different places to blog — some personal, some scholarly, and some political. So if everyone can read a person’s commentary, who would write confidential or false information that could potentially cause problems? More people than you think.

There are blogs for everything. There are even blog search engines. Do people really have so much time on their hands that they can sit at their desk all day, online, blogging about everything from religion to sex? Apparently so, because if you type the word “blog” into Google, it will bring you to 172 million different blogging websites.

Even professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are blogging as a means to better communicate with their students. It is another way to help students learn from each other. It is beneficial because it connects students to one another and allows them to converse in a completely different setting than the classroom.

But in a classroom, there is a certain level of respect and courtesy not commonly found in blogs. And in class, you can see and hear who is speaking and judge the reliability. Students not enrolled in a specific class can also observe and communicate in these blogs, sometimes revealing false information. It can be disturbing when a student relies on the blog for an answer to a question about an upcoming exam, only to find out the information given was false.

There are even blogging scandals in politics. Here’s a quick re-cap from CNN regarding George W. Bush and Howard Dean’s relation to blogging: Armstrong Williams, an African-American conservative columnist and TV host, took $240,000 from the Ketchum Communications PR firm under the Department of Education for the United States to promote the No Child Left Behind Act for Bush.

The Howard Dean campaign hired two well-known bloggers — Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos — to praise him. The difference is that Dean’s bloggers disclosed their arrangements and supported Dean before and after they were paid. Williams did not disclose his comments and criticized the No Child Left Behind Act previous to being paid. He exercised poor judgment in this decision, but the rest of his columns (which are not traditional blogs, to be sure, but which are heavily read online) were in no way, shape or form paid for by the Bush administration. Unfortunately, because of this flaw in decision making, his career is gone.

False information, false people — there is no way to tell the difference while blogging. Blogging is just one more example of how technology is a double-edged sword. It can be extremely helpful but also extremely damaging. Aristotle once said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” In doing so, blogging can remain a tool in our lives and not take it over.

Joelle Parks ([email protected]) is a freshman intending to major in journalism.