Weblogs, also called blogs, can be the best, fastest sources of archaeology news available. A weblog, if you've never seen one, is an online personal diary. An individual, called a blogger, creates a website and on it posts a series of dated paragraphs on whatever they feel like writing about at that particular point in time. The most popular blog is a personal diary, in which the blogger describes scenes from his or her life, or thoughts about the world in general. News blogs track news stories, and are written by an individual who comments on the stories as they hear about them. There are also news blogs that are machine created--in other words, whenever a news story gets posted on the Internet anywhere the blog reports it. Blogs make the traditional media nervous, because they can be written and read by anybody anywhere in the world with a computer and an Internet connection: in effect, local news reporting taken to the ultimate limit.
Archaeology blogs include professional archaeologists, students, and enthusiasts, who report and comment on the news stories that they hear about, or describe the struggles they are having with classes in archaeology or the progress of an archaeological dig. There are also machine-driven news blogs such as Archaeology Topix, archaeology photographs from Flickr, and archaeology jobs listings, from the Chronicle of Higher Education. I track about thirty of archaeology blogs and, of course, write my own blog. At the moment, there are literally thousands and thousands of blogs, and several hundreds of archaeology blogs. The software is so easy to use, you can do it too, if you want.
But you don't have to visit each of the blogs separately. Blog reader utilities such as Bloglines and GoogleNews allow you to create your own page and select the blogs you want to track. Then you simply visit your page and the blog reader utility will tell you which blog has been updated, and you can read at will. In this way, you can keep up to date on the very latest archaeology news within moments of the breaking story.
A current list of Archaeology Weblogs has been compiled.
Pro:
- Inexpensive: reading a blog doesn't cost anything except time
- Personal view points can enhance the reading experience
- Can choose which blogs to read, and even which of the messages you can read
- Very quick response, can learn about news within hours or minutes of first announcement
- Once you have set up a blog reader such as Bloglines, it is very easy to keep tabs on archaeology news
Con:
- Slightly difficult to set up (although it is getting easier)
- Personal view points can cloud the issues
- Very inconsistent, even on the best of blogs
- Usually don't get the whole story
- That sucking noise you hear? That's all the time you've spent reading news blogs
