For everyone entrenched in Web 3.0 and beyond, allow me to take you back to when you discovered blogging. Remember the empowerment of having your message spread across the globe? Remember the thrill of counting visitors coming to your site to read what you – yes, YOU – had to say?


This week, I introduced my public relations students in Armenia to blogging and they are definitely feeling that "buzz" of newly empowered bloggers. Even my biggest doubters are busy picking templates from Wordpress (https://wordpress.com/) and typing their "About Me's." Their assignment is to start a business blog, and they are going at it full bore.
Why the excitement over a medium some consider to be ho-hum these days? You have to appreciate my students' history. These are not the indulged Gen Y's of America. These young people were born at the end of the Soviet era. After the country became independent in the early 1990s, war broke out in Azerbaijan (https://www.armeniapedia.org/index.php?title=Armenian_History). Borders were sealed and the economy crumbled. The students do not remember the specifics of the war, but they do recall unheated schoolrooms, days without electricity and hours spent waiting on breadlines. Suffice it to say, no one got an Apple Lisa under the Christmas tree.
Now, my students are playing a wicked game of catch-up. Almost all have embraced cell phone technology. In fact, they are always madly texting and most store their lives on the things (pure panic pervades the classroom when someone's phone is missing). In fact, the cell phone is so revered, waiters stop taking orders in restaurants when they buzz. Bank tellers ignore their customers. Students run out of class.
But a cell phone is not a blog site. There is something much different about a blog site for my students. It is advanced technology, freedom of expression and the chance to tell their stories .... all rolled into one simple Blogger (https://www.blogger.com/) program. They're jazzed, and I am, too. In a few weeks, I'll share some of their work with you if you're interested.
In the meantime, I find that I, too, am blogging more than usual. Whereas posting an entry each day used to be a chore, I now look forward to telling the story of our lives in this so-very-foreign land. I've also convinced my husband to blog while in Armenia, and he now checks his stats hourly. After years of attempting to publish editorials in yesterday's newspapers, he finally has a platform – and he's psyched.
Yes, there are newer technologies to teach my students and I will address a few. But right now I have a room full of first-time bloggers who are truly "digging" it. For all the snarky comments we now make about self-indulgent blogophiles, there is still something to be said about the power and the thrill of authoring a blog.