The explosive growth of the Internet over the past decade has been accompanied by a rise (1) ... new ways of interacting and communicating in cyberspace. First came emails and then chat rooms. Now, growing in (2) ... popularity (3) ... an incredible rate, is something known as blogging. For those who have never heard of it, a blog, which is short (4) ... web log, is a kind of journal or diary that people write to "post' online. (5) ... beauty of blogging is that anyone can put a blog on (6) ... web and write about any topic under the sun. Some of the most interesting blogs can be found on Internet newspaper sites where readers post their comments (7) ... articles in the news. One surprising development of blogging is that they are now often used as a source of news themselves. It is not uncommon (8) ... journalists to use information that they have found on blog sites to write their articles.