Why blogs count

San Jose State University New Media in Journalism students are getting a first-hand view of why blogs are important in journalism today. IT officials at SJSU announced a little over a week ago that they were thinking of blocking Skype communication technology from the campus network. At the time it was a little known story with an interesting angle of a Silicon Valley school looking to ban a Voice over Internet Protocol program.

But blog reports, some from the members of the journalism new media class who are just learning about blogging, have created a firestorm that has bloggers all over the world writing about the story.

SJSU's Steve Sloan has put together a list of just some of the blogs reporting on the plan.

Last year a number of JACC community colleges reported independently on campus IT staffs blocking MySpace on campus computers. Each story was told in a vacuum of the campus. Imagine what might have happened had newspaper-based blogs been more prevalent and bloggers were paying attention to what was going on statewide.